HOWTO - Use Procdump to collect a memory dump from a crashing service

INFORMATION

Occasionally, in order to track down the cause of a service crash we need to acquire a process dump.  This can be accomplished using the Mircosoft procdump tool which can trigger the dump automatically when the service crashes. 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Download procdump from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/dd996900.aspx
2. Unzip the package to C:\procdump
3. Open a command prompt
4. Browse to c:\procdump
5. Run the following command: procdump -ma -e -t -accepteula ServiceExecutable "c:\procdump\ServiceExecutable.exe.dmp"

Example: procdump -ma -e -t -accepteula prairieFyre.Services.Collector.exe "c:\procdump\prairieFyre.Services.Collector.exe.dmp"

This will run the process against the service specified.  The path entered between the “” is where the dump file will be written.

The command prompt must remain open, and you must not log out of windows.  When the service crashes, it will dump the memory to the file specified, and our developers can examine the .dmp file to see what the exception thrown was.

APPLIES TO

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