Creating a dump file is excruciating slow

Question

Brief

Creating a dump file using any of the following methods is way to slow (> 2 minutes) to be usable for our current scenario.

procdump -ma notepad
procdump notepad
Open task-manager, select notepad, create dump file

Does anyone have any idea

what might be causing this
how to possibly speed this up

Edit: some extra information

Using procexp and looking at the call stack dumping notepad, it seems to be taking 100% cpu of one core in a method from dbghelp: dbghelp.dll!MiniDumpReadDumpStream+0x241a

fortunatly, we tried this first with notepad

Background

We are trying to create a dumpfile on a first-chance exception of a critical application with as minimal impact as possible. The application should not get suspended for more than a few seconds.

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score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 03 '13 at 13:03

0

From your description, it sounds like you may be requesting a full heap dump (.hdmp). Full dumps tend to take longer. If this is a one-off exercise, you can probably benefit from capturing a minidump. Otherwise, you would need to integrate a crash reporting strategy into your application.

answered Oct 03 '13 at 13:03

rrirower

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I have tried capturing a minidump using task manager but it's no avail *(•Open task-manager, select notepad, create dump file)* – Lieven Keersmaekers Oct 03 '13 at 13:28

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 28 '14 at 06:14

In the end, this turned out to be related to the combination of our AV and a specific dbghelp.dll version.

Tested combinations

AV Enabled with dbghelp version 6.0 is way to slow
AV Disabled with dbghelp version 6.0 is no problem
AV Enabled with dbghelp version 6.3 is no problem

dbghelp.dll Versions tested

Creating a dump file is excruciating slow

2 Answers2