« Memory leak, spiking threads, wait chain, high critical section contention and module variety: pattern cooperation
On Extraterrestrial Problem »

How to simulate a process hang?

One question that people often ask is to how to simulate a process hang. One method that I found is to attach WinDbg noninvasively, freeze all threads by executing the following command:

~*n

and then quit by using q command. This leaves an application or a service process in a total hang state.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Crash Dump Analysis, Debugging, Software Technical Support, Testing, Tools, WinDbg Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “How to simulate a process hang?”

  1. Dmitry Vostokov Says:
    January 26th, 2009 at 2:31 pm

    I also got other suggestions such as to use pssuspend tool:

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897540.aspx

    and Process Explorer

  2. Crash Dump Analysis » Blog Archive » Stack trace collection, blocked thread and coupled processes: pattern cooperation Says:
    February 11th, 2009 at 3:15 pm

    […] Year of Debugging 2010 (0×7DA) - The Year of Dump Analysis This is a continuation of the story of process hang simulation where I made all threads in IE7 instance frozen. I left that process frozen after my experiments […]

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.