New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Rich Lander [MSFT] — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 23:50:06 GMT

@Nate Finch -- Thanks for the feedback, Nate. I added an update near the end of the blog post, in "Important Considerations".

Process Explorer only supports running in X64 on X64 Windows. Our implementation only works when the architecture of Process Explorer and the app process match. We were able to deliver this experience w/o a lot of expense, so opted to do so. We would have liked to deliver the better experience, but could not due to the significantly larger cost impacting other commitments. Apologies that the wording was less than clear. I hope the updated text fixes that.

It would be good to know how important it would be too you if you could use this feature for 32-bit apps on X64 machines. Would it be a big win for you?

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Nate Finch — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 16:53:04 GMT

A bunch of people have posted this but there's been no answer. You say the architecture of Process Explorer has to match the architecture of the process you're getting the stack from... but Process Explorer always runs as 64 bit on 64 bit OSes. Is there a way to override that so it runs as 32 bit, in order to get stack traces from 32 bit applications running on a 64 bit OS? I'm sure this has to be a pretty common occurrence.

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

BillW33 — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:07:50 GMT

Good work, a very useful tool.

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Rich Lander [MSFT] — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:17:48 GMT

@Ashish -- We'll need more information in order to help you. No other customers are reporting issues, so this is likely something pretty specific.

Repro steps and a dump file would be super useful for us to move forward on this.

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Ashish — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:59:09 GMT

Multiple releases in few weeks of the tool - The wonderful util is crashing now on my machine - Windows XP SP2 with Office 2010 SP1.

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Yoco — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:03:51 GMT

Very nice feature indeed!

I bumped into a catch in trying to use it "in the real world" though, and the catch is already described in your "Important Considerations" section, namely the bit where you write "The architecture of Process Explorer must match the architecture of the managed process you are inspecting in order to see managed frames–applies to x64 Windows only".

Most of the .NET process on my 64-bit windows machine run as 32-bit processes, so I cannot use this feature unless I recompile them to 64-bit. As far as I know it is not possible to run 32-bit Process Explorer on a 64-bit OS, isn't it? Trying to do so simply extracts a 64-bit version and runs that.

Is there any hope that in the future we may be able to inspect 32-bit managed stacks on a 64 bit OS? Or is the reason it is not possible to do so now "too deep" to fix?

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Moondevil — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 07:59:01 GMT

Great work! Some information about JIT would be nice.

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Greg — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 18:52:25 GMT

How about a break on variable modified that allows for the variable to be moved during GC? This would let us break on object.field.subfield.x being modified.

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Noah Falk (MSFT) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 21:24:24 GMT

@Rolf Kristensen

> I want more than performance counters.

In that case you might want to use a different (and also free, xcopyable) tool: Perf View

www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx

re: New .NET Diagnostic info added to Process Explorer

Rolf Kristensen — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 14:36:49 GMT

@rjcox

> Select ".Net CLR Memory" to see all the perf counters for the process in that object.

I want more than performance counters. I want to see the number of each object type the .NET heap. Knowing the heap size will not tell me what type of objects I'm leaking. Thought that when you were able to display .NET callstacks, then you would not be far from doing .NET reflection :)