Debug Diagnostic 1.2 – Generate a manual hang dump on a specific process

This article will detail the action plan you can implement to generate a manual hang dump using Debug Diagnostic for a specific process.
In this case we will focus on the W3WP.exe process corresponding to your Application Pool in IIS that is experiencing a hang.

This action plan can be applied when your W3WP.exe process or your application is hanged and that you are quickly aware of the situation to generate a dump yourself before the issue is gone. A hang of a process means the application is no longer responding within a normal execution time or is even not responding at all but the process is not crashing. This means there is no stop or restart of the process and you won't see any change to the Process ID.

Action Plan

• Debug Diagnostic 1.2 can be download at the following URL: https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26798
• Once the tool has been installed and executed on the IIS server, the wizard "Select Rule Type" loads
• Click on "Cancel"

• Go in the "Processes" tab (Please note this section doesn't refresh automatically. You can press the F5 key to refresh the processes list.)

  • Right click on the W3WP.exe process facing the hang issue and click on "Create Userdump Series…"

  • If you have several W3WP.exe processes, you can have check the "Web application pool name" column to know which one is corresponding to your Application Pool

• Once the dump has been generated the following message will be displayed. Click on "OK"

The dumps are located by default in "C:\Program Files\DebugDiag\Logs\Misc".
This location can be modified by using the "Tools > Options and Settings…" menu, via the field "Manuel Userdump Save Folder".

We hope this article will help you out.

See you soon.

Sylvain Lecerf and the French IIS Microsoft Support Team