Crash Dump Analysis Patterns (Part 13g)
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009Thanks to Sonny Mir who pointed to !filecache WinDbg command to diagnose low VACB (Virtual Address Control Block or View Address Control Block) conditions I was able to discern another Insufficient Memory pattern for control blocks in general. Certain system and subsystem architectures and designs may put a hard limit on the amount of data structures created to manage resources. If there is a dependency on such resources from other subsystems there could be starvation and blockage conditions resulting in a sluggish system behaviour, absence of a functional response and even in some cases a perceived system, service or application freeze.
7: kd> !filecache
***** Dump file cache******
Reading and sorting VACBs ...
Removed 0 nonactive VACBs, processing 1907 active VACBs …
File Cache Information
Current size 408276 kb
Peak size 468992 kb
1907 Control Areas
[…]
I plan to add more insufficient control block case studies including user space.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -