Process Explorer 8.10

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[Apologies for the lack of updates: we've been upgrading the GotDotNet blog server
hardware. Normal service should now be resumed, with more stability and performance
hopefully.]

I wanted to draw attention to the new release of Process
Explorer from Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals.
Mark has released a host of remarkable tools since the early days of Windows NT, most
of which have been released at no charge. Process Explorer provides a replacement
for Task Manager, taskkill, shutdown and some of the debugger
tools, all wrapped up into one useful tool. 

I've had Process Explorer installed on my machine for a year or two, but on an idle
visit to the Sysinternals website I noticed that it now offers some new features that
are particularly relevant to .NET developers. You can now filter it to show only .NET
processes, and then view associated appdomains and performance counters, such as:

- Number and size of currently JITted methods;

Size of each GC heap;
  • Number of current database connections and size of pool.

Process Explorer is one of those tools that's worth hiding away in a Tools directory
for when you want to deal with a spurious error or investigate exactly what's going
on with your system.