Today I got a question from a reader (Chris) about a memory leak they are seeing in their application When we do a '!dumpheap -min 85000 -type Byte[]' we can see 100s of byte array objects using up ~545MB of memory. A majority of the objects are the same size (either 4.5 or 9MB in size). Looking at the memory addresses, they all appear to be different copies of our assemblies. And when we do !GcRoot on those addresses they all either have no results returned, or show a rooted System.Security.Policy...

It is not often that I stray too far from debugging and ASP.NET on my blog, but this time I am going to make an exception because I am just really excited about this:) so I'll put this post in the "bag of chips" category... I finally installed the first games on my Zune, and in reality it wasn't even a game, but a clock, a feature that I had really been missing. I am sure that it will get a lot easier as everything goes public but for now, here is what I did to install the games with the...

We just released a hotfix for an issue where you get 100% CPU in vbc.exe when compiling large applications in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Apart from the 100% CPU situation you may also notice symptoms like visual studio taking a very long time to return or error messages like Error 246 Timed out waiting for a program to execute. The command being executed was "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\vbc.exe" /noconfig @"C:\TempFiles\MyApp\8ec39ce7\e41b4e32\gpznqwbu.cmdline". or ...

Save the date!  TechEd Developers North America 2008 just finished but there is plenty more to come... I know it's a bit early still, but November 10th through 14th TechEd Developer 2008 is coming to Barcelona, Spain and the session list is already starting to build. This will be my first time at TechEd so I am really excited, especially with it being in Spain (since I'm half Spanish).   If you want to check out the sessions that are already posted you can do so here and give feedback...

This is an issue I come across once in a while and since I am not a COM expert by any means I actually had to check in with our COM guys to see what was going on in this case, and as it turned out (this is embarrassing:)) I had already written about the root cause of this issue before ( here ). So what I am learning from this is that perhaps I should at least check my blog before asking questions:) Problem description Intermittently the application will stall, so all requests will hang until...

In many of my posts I have discussed performance issues and memory issues caused by excessive use of the Large Object Heap, here are a few examples... ASP.NET Case Study: High CPU in GC - Large objects and high allocation rates ASP.NET Case Study: Bad perf, high memory usage and high CPU in GC - Death By ViewState Maoni just wrote a nice article in MSDN Magazine called CLR Inside Out: Large Object Heap Uncovered , it is definitely worth a read if you are interested in how the GC works and specifically...

I recently received a question from a reader who wanted to know how to set breakpoints in code for applications that crash on startup. The email went like this: I have a .NET app which is crashing upon startup (it even causes DW20.exe to make an appearance). When I open the .NET app in Windbg, I can see exactly what the exception is and where it happens. What I would like to do is put a breakpoint on the method where the exception is being raised so that I can step through it. This is where I'm stuck...