Tom Christian's Blog : Debugging

What do you need to troubleshoot Azure?

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Looking to the future with cloud computing, it is going to become increasingly important to have good information about what is happening with your site in order to properly maintain it. Keeping development type of issues aside, what types of things do...(read more)

Strange callstacks

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:00:00 GMT

How many times have you been troubleshooting a dump or application, you look at the callstack and you see something that just doesn’t quite look right. Chances are the problem is that you don’t have correct symbols. For example, if you see something...(read more)

ASP.NET Tip: How to avoid creating a GC Hole

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:00:00 GMT

There are only a few things that can make a .NET process crash. The most common one is an Unhandled Exception getting raised. Another way that is can happen is by creating a GC Hole. What is a GC Hole So first a little background on what I...(read more)

Who uses SOSEX and what for?

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Another thing I am curious to know is if anyone is using SOSEX and what advantages it gives you for debugging. I have talked to the author of it and I think it has a lot of useful commands, just wanted to get everyone’s take on it. Let me know any...(read more)

High Memory part 6 – Fragmentation revisited

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:00:00 GMT

I have talked about a bunch of commands used to troubleshoot a managed memory problem in the past and given some situations of using them like: High memory, CPU, or other performance problems with .NET High Memory continued - Datatables High Memory part...(read more)

Debugger Extension update

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:00:09 GMT

The debugger extension that we were working on getting out with the debugger package has hit some roadblocks and it looks like it isn't going to be shipping with the debugger anytime soon. We are looking to see if we can find an alternative method to...(read more)

How do you test the performance of your web site?

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 10:00:00 GMT

I wanted to get a feel for what tools people are using to test the performance of their website. My questions are: Do you check page-load times? Do you dig in to see which files are taking the time How do you track down a page that uses a...(read more)

SOS Tip: Using help

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:32:00 GMT

This is just a quick little note to remind everyone that the !help command in sos can be very helpful. Not only does it list all of the possible commands, but if you run it and pass it the name of a command, it will print out a bunch of really useful...(read more)

SOS Best Practice: Match the SOS version with the process being analyzed

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:00:00 GMT

I haven’t seen a whole of of issues around this as of yet, but now that 3.5 SP1 has released that may change. If you copy SOS.dll to another location and then load it out of that directory to troubleshoot dumps, you may start seeing problems. ...(read more)

Do you think about supportability?

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT

So I wanted to get a read on how people design their web sites. My thinking is that there isn’t much time spent in planning for supportability. There are a lot of other concerns that take priority, What is more important – Design or Content...(read more)

ASP.NET Tips: DumpAllExceptions output changes

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT

The first time you run !DumpAllExceptions you will see it print out one full exception for each type of exception that is in the dump. This will include the message and the callstack of the exception. For example: Any time after that, if you run the same...(read more)

Windows Internal Beta Exam 70-660

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:04:02 GMT

I wanted to pass along some really exciting news if you haven’t heard about it yet, we are getting ready to release a new certification that targets developers and IT professionals who need to know about the internals of Windows for their job. You...(read more)

Debugging ASP.NET on a Production Server 101

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT

So I thought I would put all the information together in one place that I have been creating over the past few months. I’ll try to go through all the steps and the different things that you will need to use in order to track down a problem. Realizing...(read more)

SOS: Always use the correct debugger

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT

I cannot stress this enough. It is very important that you use the same architecture for the debugger as the process that you are trying to troubleshoot. Wrong version when capturing a dump If you use a 64-bit debugger to capture a dump of a32-bit...(read more)

SOS: Upcoming release has a few new commands – HeapStat

ASP.NET Debugging : IIS — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:00:00 GMT

There are a lot of times where all you want to see are the sizes of the various heaps and generations. For the heaps, you can use !eeheap -gc to see the sizes, but the output can be a little difficult to read as it prints out so much other stuff...(read more)