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I have a couple of servers with a process that regularly gets stuck. We kill this process with a vbs script that runs the taskkill command (among a couple other things). The issue is that the process name keeps changing. At one point, it showed up as "FusionLoanSvr.exe", but eventually changed to "Fusion~1.exe" and now "Fusion~2.exe".

This change in process name forces me to modify the script each time it happens, and it's of course not consistent across all the servers.

Does anyone know why the short name is used, why it's been incremented to ~2, and either a way to stop it from using the short name or a way to kill the process via script without having to reference the exact EXE name as seen in Task Manager?

Thanks!

Steve G
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  • It would help if you told is what the actual process was and how it's started. Also - ` have a couple of servers with a process that regularly gets stuck. We kill this process with a vbs script that runs the taskkill command (among a couple other things). The issue is that the process name keeps changing.` - Actually, your problem is that your process keeps hanging. You should probably find out why and fix it. Anything else is putting a bandaid on a broken arm :) – MDMarra Nov 05 '12 at 17:26
  • The process is a third party application that gets launched via an IIS webapp. I would love to fix the issue altogether, but it's not a realistic short term solution. – Steve G Nov 05 '12 at 17:37
  • Why won't you give us the actual application's name? – MDMarra Nov 05 '12 at 17:38
  • I apologize - it's pretty custom so I didn't think it would be relevant. I added it. – Steve G Nov 05 '12 at 17:47

1 Answers1

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Mmmhhhh.

This is a bit of (educated) guesswork based upon similar behavior I have seen with IIS apps.

I think the first time the application is launched by IIS it is called by the same name as the EXE file.
For some reason IIS spawns a seconds copy of the process. This gets the name~1.exe name. A 3rd copy gets name˜2.exe and so on.

It could be that the reason why the extra process spawns is because the first process is no longer responding.
Could also be that the 1st one hangs because of the fact that a 2nd one is launched. (Maybe both processes try to access the same resources causing a deadlock ?)

In my experience such a thing is frequently the result of a misconfiguration of the IIS application pool and/or worker threads.

Anyway: A sort of quick and dirty hack comes to mind: Just periodically check if name˜1.exe is in memory. If it there: Houston we've got a problem.
Then just kill ˜9.exe, ˜8.exe .... ˜1.exe and name.exe whether they are there or not.

Tonny
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  • This pretty much sums up my experience. I was hoping there was more of a reason behind the choice to use a short name for a process, but I can't find any information about it anywhere. I guess I'll just have to write into the script to kill more process name variations in anticipation of an increment to the number at the end of the process name. Thanks! – Steve G Nov 07 '12 at 21:25
  • @SteveG You're welcome. I agree that it's not very satisfying, but sometimes, you just need to accept the facts of life, write the kludge and move on to other things. – Tonny Nov 07 '12 at 22:29