Where’s my dump gone?!?

Have you ever found yourself patiently waiting for a problem to reproduce with your debugger ready, and when it happens you just find there are no signs of your dump anywhere? If you are using adplus you likely had the text logs, but nothing more…

In such situations it is possible that the OS is terminating the process before the dump is fully written. If you are tying to dump an IIS process and you want to save some time and headaches, try this small cunning: temporarily disable the “Enable pinging” and “Enable rapid-fail protection” flags in the Health tab for your application pool:

 

Sometimes can be useful to tell IIS to not kill a failing worker process but rather leave it orphaned:

Features of Worker Process Isolation Mode

Orphaning Worker Processes

You can configure worker process isolation mode to orphan a worker process that the WWW service deems to be failing. The WWW service usually terminates a failing worker process and replaces it. If you enable orphaning, the WWW service allows a failing worker process to continue running, but separates it from the application pool (making it an orphan) and starts a new worker process in its place. You can configure the WWW service to run a command on the orphaned worker process — for example, launching a debugger.

For more information about orphaning worker processes, including how to configure this feature, see Running IIS 6.0 as an Application Server in this book and OrphanWorkerProcess Metabase Property metabase property.

In IIS 6 there the following three metabase properties can be handy to run some custom actions in case of an application pool failure:

• OrphanWorkerProcess: The OrphanWorkerProcess property, when set to true, notifies the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW Service) not to terminate a worker process that fails to respond to pings, but to instead orphan the worker process in the application pool if the worker process suffers fatal errors
• OrphanActionParams: The OrphanActionParams property specifies command-line parameters for the executable specified by the OrphanActionExe Metabase Property. To specify the process ID of the orphaned process, use %1%.
• OrphanActionExe: The OrphanActionExe property specifies an executable to run when the World Wide Web Publishing Service (WWW service) orphans a worker process. You can use the OrphanActionParams Metabase Property to send parameters to the executable

The article How to generate a dump file when ASP.NET deadlocks in IIS 6.0 explains how to use the properties above and despite its title, you can use this technique to run the custom actions you need/want not only in case of an ASP.NET deadlock but in every circumstance that fits your needs.

In IIS 7 you can easily use the Advanced Settings dialog or your application pool:

 

Finally, while w3wp.exe cannot run without Data Execution Prevention, if you are debugging a custom process you may want to add it to the exclusion list:

 

 

Carlo

Quote of the day:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. - Abraham Maslow