Memory Dump Analysis Anthology- P24: This is a revised, edited, cross-referenced and thematically organized volume of selected blog posts about crash dump analysis and debugging written in 2006 - 2007 for software engineers developing and maintaining products on Windows platforms, technical support and escalation engineers dealing with complex software issues and general Windows users. | Post-Debugging Complications 691 POST-DEBUGGING COMPLICATIONS Real story suddenly an application being developed started to leak memory very rapidly and in huge amounts 100Mb per second. That application used a DLL that was known to have memory leaks but those leaks were much smaller before. After spending the whole day debugging this problem a developer renamed the application just to keep its current version and launched it again. The same executable file but under a different name started to consume much less memory as before the problem. After renaming it back the application started to consume huge amounts of memory again. Scratching his head the developer recalled that he enabled full page heap placing allocations at the end of full pages 3 weeks ago. The moral of this story is always to revert changes made for debugging purposes back as soon as debugging session is finished or to use fresh and separate debugging environment every time. The latter is much easier nowadays if we use VMWare Virtual PC or Xen. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on to remove this watermark 692 PART 13 Miscellaneous THE ELEMENTS OF CRASH DUMP ANALYSIS STYLE After looking at multitude of crash dump analysis reports from different companies and engineers I would like to highlight several rules that make them good Format your debugger output in fixed size font Courier New or Lucida Console . This is very important for readability. Bold and highlight using different colors important addresses or data. Keep the same color for the same address or data consistently. Use red color for bug manifestation points. If we refer to a dump files we should put a link to it. What is considered bad crash dump analysis style These are Variable size font you copy your debugger output to Outlook e-mail as is and it is using the default font there. Highlight the whole data set for example stack trace in red. Too much irrelevant information. Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on
