The other day I came across an issue where an ASP.NET site stopped responding and didn’t start serving requests again until the W3WP.exe process was restarted. We grabbed some memory dumps with debug diag before restarting the process to see what was going on. Debugging the dumps: I opened the dump in windbg, and loaded up sos (.loadby sos mscorwks). As with all hang dumps I usually check what the threads are doing (~* kb) and I found that one thread (10) was initiating a garbage collection...

TechED Europe – Berlin -  9-13th of November This will be the 2nd time I present at TechED. Last time I had an absolute blast and heard some really  good speakers. I am still working with the TechED team on exactly what type of sessions I will get, and exactly what I’ll be talking about but I’m sure it won’t surprise anybody reading this blog that there will be a lot of debugging involved:)  There will be lot’s of windbg and maybe some Visual Studio 2010 stuff, and of course since...

I recently had a customer that just moved from Windows 2008 to Windows 2008 R2 (changing from IIS 7 to IIS 7.5) and after the move they got some weird forms authentication errors in the event log The problem They have two applications (MyWebApp and MyLoginWebApp) where forms authentication is dealt with in MyLoginWebApp <authentication mode="Forms"> <forms name="MyAppAuth" loginUrl="/MyLoginWebApp/Default.aspx" protection="All" timeout="720" path="/" slidingExpiration="true"...

Is it a plane, is it a bird, is it a UFO? Before you can delve into any kind of troubleshooting of an issue you need to thoroughly define it.  If you don’t you’ll probably end up spending a lot of time randomly gathering and looking at data that is probably not even relevant to the issue at hand.  More importantly, how do you even know that your problem is fixed if you don’t have a good definition of the problem? This might sound like common sense, but having worked with troubleshooting...