I have several apps hosted in IIS that are running at the same time. When I attach to a process in the Visual Studio debugger, I see several w3p processes. The only way I can tell which one to attach to is by trial and error (if I attach to the wrong one, the breakpoints say they will not be hit). How can I know right away which process to attach to?
Using the taskmanager, view processes, add column process id.
Trigger a page to see some CPU usage. Now you know the process to attach to.
Unless you've changed app pool settings, the name of the application pool will appear as part of the "User Name" in the attach window:
What would be really nice would be if this user name could also appear in the Processes window, so when attached to multiple processes you could figure out which was which. But that doesn't seem possible.
Related
On Microsoft Windows (8), I would like to start a process, and prevent it from showing any windows at all. Alternatively, to force-close any windows that are shown. Is there a way to do this?
My application is this: I'm running an automated (nunit) test suite on my continuous integration (teamcity) server. The code under test is also used by an interactive application. Developers occasionally slip in a dialog with a user prompt, without realising what they are doing. This causes the CI process to stop, waiting for user input which never comes. I'd like to be able to dismiss any dialog that appears, or prevent them from being shown.
Even better would be to force an exception at this point, so that the test would also fail.
In my case, this is a C# application, and the dialogs shown are Windows Forms or WPF dialogs.
I did find a couple of similar questions. However each turned out to be solving a slightly different problem.
Stop a process from showing a window from C# (solves a different problem)
Preventing blocking dialogs/message boxes/hanging GUI from non-interactive processes on Windows? (promising solution but C++-specific)
Prevent child process from creating visible windows? (solves a different problem)
Have you considered asking your development team to have a "no dialog" mode of the app for testing purposes? Perhaps if you stopped referring to them as (!!*&%) they would be more inclined to partner with you. ;) Afterall, you do work at the same company on the same product :)
In any case, without a dev-specific solution, consider having a another app (process or thread) that continually sleeps for a few seconds, wakes up and looks for a modal dialog in your application. You can use APIs such as FindWindow to identify when a modal dialog has popped up. (Use Spy++ to get the class name for windows created by MessageBox and CreateDialog APIs).
TL;DR - How does the Spy++ tool really construct its process list?
Stage
We have an MFC desktop application (running on Windows XP) that is hanging in that it doesn't react to any user input anymore. It is redrawn when switching to it via alt-tab however. (It does receive WM_SETFOCUS, WM_ACTIVATE, etc. It apparently does not receive any mouse or keyboard messages.)
Since the app is hanging in some limbo, we pulled a few process dumps, but these were of little help so far. Enter:
Spy++
We used Spy++ to find the information I gave above about the window messages this application seems to be processing. We did this by Opening the Windows View and selecting our application Window and in the Messages properties selected Windows of same process and Messages to View : Select All.
However we first tried to view all messages of this process by opening the Processes View of Spy++ and our application is not shown in this process list. Cross checking on another PC where the app is running normally, the process is also normally shown in the processes list of Spy++.
Can anything about the misbehaving app be inferred from the fact that the process is not shown in Spy++'s Process View, but the main window of the app is shown in the Windows View. Why would a process with a main window that is visible not be shown in Spy++'s Processes View?
The process is listed in Task Manager and in the Attach Process Window of Visual Studio 2005. So these tools apparently use a different method to list processes than Spy++ ... ?
The system where the app is currently hanging is a Windows XP SP2 system and we've used the Spy++ Utility that comes with Visual Studio 2005.
The behavior does recur occasionally, but only after the App has been running for several days!
Running Vista or later? Your process is probably elevated and Spy++ is not. Newer versions of Spy++ require elevation. So, try elevating Spy++ explicitly and see if that helps.
Yes, of course things can be inferred from this. Don't take anything I say too seriously in this context, I'd have to go look at the code. But I believe that Spy goes off and looks at the EnumProcesses API. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682629.aspx)
So, if your process isn't showing up there... hrm.
But, what is different between the system where it's working and the one where it's not?
Spy++ requires the following two values in the registry to be disabled (0) to display the processes/threads list AT ALL:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfProc\Performance
Disable Performance Counters -> either 0 or not present
Was going insane trying to find out why it refused to display them. It's some kind of bad joke - this debugger requires itself a debugger to get it working! Not that WinDBG would display any meaningful info, MS doesn't even provide a symbol file on their symbol server, pfft.
Anyway, maybe it doesn't display processes that have their performance counters disabled, because I think, this can be set on individual basis, at least for services, like:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\.NET CLR Networking\Performance
Disable Performance Counters
So it's basically always a value of the "Performance" subkey. All this stuff is undocumented, it makes use of advapi32.dll functions like "PerfRegQueryValue" and "PerfRegQueryInfoKey"... don't ask me.
My program is for rendering an animation clip, but every frame has to be computed before rendered. It seems that if the computation takes seconds, windows starts to recognize my process as "not-responding" and refuses to render anything any more, although in the Task Manager, the process itself appears to switch between "running" and "not-responding" all the time.
I have been searching solutions online for a while. A lot people suggested to delete some registry entries:
HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\HungAppTimeOut
HKEY_USERS.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\WaitToKillAppTimeOut
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\HungAppTimeOut
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WaitToKillAppTimeOut
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WaitToKillServiceTimeOut
But I could not find those entries. And according to the descriptions, all those entries mentioned are about controlling how long the system waits after the user requires to end a process or log off to kill a process or service. So they are not what exactly I want. I guess there must be some threshold to control when the system should start to consider one process as "not responding" and I want to change that threshold into a slightly bigger one.
Thanks for your attention and time, any suggestion is welcome!
You should avoid hanging the UI in the first place by doing your processing/computation in a background thread, rather than on the UI thread. If you're using WinForms or WPF, use a BackgroundWorker.
See here for some BGWorker examples: WPF Threads: Build More Responsive Apps With The Dispatcher
I'm using Microstation to build a model, so this is a similar process. About half way through building the model everything freezes up and adds the "application not responding" message to the title.
Disabling the Desktop Window Manager Session Manager worked for me, however in a enterprise environment this is not the best solution, as common users don't have rights to access the services panel.
Try disabling Desktop Window Manager Session Manager from services. Worked for me. That also disabled aero theme by the way. Win7 really looks fancy but it has to operate normally.
In Visual Studio's Attach to Process dialog, one of the columns in the Available Processes list is "Title", which lists the title of the topmost window owned by each process.
We spawn multiple instances of several server processes in order to compartmentalize the work. For these console processes, the Title field is blank, so currently we have to look up the process id in our management tool in order to find the correct process.
In order to streamline the debugging process, I would love to be able to use the Title field to directly determine which process I want.
SetConsoleTitle does not do the trick, nor SetWindowText with a NULL hWnd. To the best of my knowledge, a console application does not intrinsically own any window handles that we could pass to SetWindowText. We don't want to create any visible windows for these server processes.
Any suggestions for a reasonable way to trick Visual Studio into displaying some useful information here?
I think you might be out of luck. The console window does not belong to the console process, but instead belongs to a system process (conhost.exe on win7 and maybe vista, csrss.exe before that) so if Visual Studio is just looking for a processes top level windows it won't find the console window. Probing consoles out of proc is not supported as far as I know, so there is probably no sensible way for visual studio to see the title of the console windows you have.
One possible solution might be to create a top level window in your console process as a debugging aid. You might want to conditionally compile it, so it is only available when you're debugging though. Just create an additional thread which pumps messages, and create a top level window. If you set the right styles the window will be invisible. You might not want to ship with the window in the code because in long running server code, windows always increase your attack surface, even if only a little bit.
This is probably not very helpful, but it is worth mentioning that on windows the preferred way of portioning up work would be to use threads rather than multiple processes. A process is an expensive object, and threads are much cheaper in terms of system resources as well as being easier to debug.
My Visiual studio hangs all of a sudden when debugging the windows application. It's takes while to repond and but it's closing my application. I keep getting this issue everytime in every debugging session.
Please help to fix this problem.
Your application also stops responding right? If so, I presume that your application is giving VS problems. Presumably because some operation is tying up the main thread. When that is tied up no other events can be processed (button clicks, screen redrawing, close buttons, etc). That could be caused by an infinitive loop, or perhaps Disk IO or waiting for a network connection or a database query result, or a deadlock.
My suggestion would be to do some type of logging so you can identify where the problem is at. For instance, put a breakpoint at the top and bottom of major functions. After you break at the top one, hit play. If you don't hit the bottom one you know that the problem is somewhere in that area.
Or, do some sort of logging like putting Console.WriteLn("Entering MyFunction()") at various places in the code.
Once you know where the problem is at, you can fix it.