Summary
All Electric Cloud binaries are designed to automatically generate a stack trace minidump if they encounter an unexpected exception. The program will generate a program .dmp file next to the program .exe file. You can instruct the application to generate a full minidump instead of a stack-only minidump by creating/setting the registry key program and setting the dumpType value for it:
HKLM\Software\Electric Cloud\'program':dumpType (dword)
The dword is a bitmask of MINIDUMP_TYPE values:
0 = stack only (default)
1 = stack and global vars
2 = full memory
4 = handle data
Here’s an example of how to enable full memory dumps with vars for the eMake and/or Apache programs:
Create new registry key for emake
HKLM\Software\Electric Cloud\emake
and/or
Create new registry key for Apache
HKLM\Software\Electric Cloud\Apache
Then create new DWORD value for the new key
dumpType set value of dumpType = 3 (1 for vars + 2 for full memory = 3)
Solution
Forcing a Minidump
If you have a hung process (e.g., agent or eMake), you can generate a minidump file by attaching to the process with the Visual Studio .NET debugger:
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Start devenv.
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Select
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Find your process in the list then select Attach…
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Wait for it to finish loading symbols, then select Break
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Close the process window.
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Select
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Enter a file name.
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Change the type field to Minidump with Heap (.dmp)*
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Hit Save
You now have a .dmp file on disk that contains the full memory image of the process.
Generating a Minidump at a Customer Site
The following procedure allows you to generate a full memory dump of any running process on a Windows host without having to start Visual Studio or stopping the running program:
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Download the dumpit.zip file.
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Unzip the files into a directory on the machine.
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Start a command shell and cd to the directory.
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Run the command:
cdb /pv /pn processName /c ".dump /mf mydump.dmp; qq"
If you’re attaching to an agent on a machine with more than one agent.exe running, use the process id instead of name:
cdb /pv /p pid /c ".dump /mf mydump.dmp; qq"
You can ignore the verbose and scary looking warnings that are generated by the debugger. This procedure should generate a file called mydump.dmp in the current directory containing a full memory image of the process. The process should continue running without a hitch. If there is more than one process with the same name, you can replace /pn with /p and specify a pid instead.