Archive for October 5th, 2014

Crash Dump Analysis Patterns (Part 212)

Sunday, October 5th, 2014

Although in the case of system hangs we, usually, recommend dumping Stack Trace Collection, in some cases it is very time-consuming, especially when it involves thousands of processes such as in modern terminal services environments. In such a case, if the problem description indicates the last action such as a not progressing user logon or a recently launched process we first check the tail of the corresponding linked list where Last Object is usually added to the tail of the list:

Sometimes we can simply check the end of some enumerated collection such as sessions (dotted lines represent ALPC Wait Chains):

This analysis pattern can be added to the first tier of RSDP. If nothing found around a couple of Last Objects we then resort to the analysis of entire linked lists.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org + TraceAnalysis.org -