If you ask me what had I been doing the last two weeks – then the answer is I was pulling my hairs.  A customer had a problem with their site as the memory hiked up after catalog imports and stayed there “forever” – and in the end it slowed the site down. I jumped in and almost regretted that decision – had to spent days  messing around with WinDBG and memory dumps. In the end – I found the problem and it was fixed. A lot of hairs were loss in progress, but I learned something about WinDBG – and that’s what I’m sharing today.

WinDBG is probably the most famous tool for debugging stuffs on Windows. Out of the box, it only works with native applications, aka assembly and such – but lucky for us, there are plenty of extensions to allow it to work with .NET application. The “standard” SOS and more advanced extension SOSEX. SOS is included in WinDBG, while you can download SOSEX from here (for 64 bit) or here (for 32 bit) . Download the zip file and extract the dll somewhere.

WinDBG comes with the Windows SDK, not the standard .NET framework, so you’ll probably need to install it separately from here

Continue reading “Debug .NET memory dump with WinDBG – crash course. Part 1” →