In the course of my job, I use ADPlus (a command-line tool that ships with Debugging Tools for Windows) to capture hang dumps on a regular basis. For both low and high CPU scenarios, I generally need 2-3 hang dumps spaced out over about 10 minutes. Historically, I have always given customers the command-line below and asked them to run it 2-3 times over 10 minutes:
adplus –hang –pn someprocess.exe –o somefolder
Most of the time, customers follow the instructions. However, sometimes they forget my instructions or they hand my instructions off to someone else and they get garbled in the transition, etc. The end result is that I don’t always get the series of dumps I need to properly analyze the problem.
ADPlus v7.01.002 to the rescue!!!
I was working on taking a hang dump of a process on my local machine the other day and happened to mistype the command-line. As ADPlus is wont to do, it spit out all of the possible switches to the command-line. Lo and behold, there was an “ADPlus Flash” section with a new switch that caught my eye:
-r <quantity> <interval in seconds> Runs –hang multiple times
Multiple hang dumps triggered from a single command-line? Awesome!! Even better, some testing demonstrated that all of the hang dumps go into one folder. This is a better experience than having parallel folders with one for each execution of –hang.
I will be using this going forward to capture my serial hang dumps and I would recommend you do, too.
P.S. Notice the release date for the new version of ADPlus? 2/27/2009. That means it took me more than a year to notice this. Sigh…
Evan Basalik | Senior Support Escalation Engineer | Microsoft SQL Server Escalation Services