Tom Christian's Blog

So I was looking around CodePlex the other day and I came across some really useful tools up there that I thought I would share.  Not all of these will apply to everyone, but they can be really useful things and I would recommend you to check them out and see if they apply to what you are creating.

There are two ways to gather data in a Deadlock situation.  If you are using Windows 2003 or later (IIS 6.0 or later), then follow the steps in the KB 828222

I am not sure how many people are familiar with the .NET Reference Source project, but if you do a lot of debugging of .NET code, chances are that you have had a situation where you wanted to be able to step into the .NET Source from within Visual Studio.

When debugging, some of you may have noticed that looking at a managed callstack looks a little different then a native one.  One of the big differences is that you don't see the parameters that are passed to the function.  So what can we do about that?

For this quiz.  Let’s say that you run a web server and your customers complain that the site is running slow.  What do you do to troubleshoot it?

A Crash in IIS occurs when an IIS process (INETINFO.EXE, DLLHOST.EXE, W3WP.EXE) terminates unexpectedly. A Crash typically happens when there is an Unhandled Exception caused by an Access Violation, Stack Overflow, etc. In these situations, the operating system catches the exception and terminates the process.

A Memory Leak in an IIS process (INETINFO.EXE, DLLHOST.EXE, W3WP.EXE) occurs when Memory Usage in Task Manager continues to consume more than 50% of the physical RAM until running out of system memory or until the process stops functioning.

On machines running IIS5 and IIS5.1, these are the Inetinfo.exe, DLLHost.exe and/or ASPNET_WP.exe processes. On machines running IIS 6 or 7, this is the w3wp.exe process.