Legacy Update: Get back online, activate, and install updates on your legacy Windows PC

The Debug Diagnostic Tool (DebugDiag) is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as hangs, slow performance, memory leaks or fragmentation, and crashes in any user-mode process. Please note that the latest available version of DebugDiag is 1.2 and is available from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26798

• Introduction
  
  The Debug Diagnostic Tool (DebugDiag) is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as hangs, slow performance, memory leaks or fragmentation, and crashes in any user-mode process. The tool includes additional debugging scripts focused on Internet Information Services (IIS) applications, web data access components, COM+ and related Microsoft technologies.
  
  DebugDiag 1.0 was released as part of the IIS Diagnostic toolkit and as a standalone tool. DebugDiag 1.1 is currently available as a standalone tool.
  
  
  Overview
  
  DebugDiag provides an extensible object model in the form of COM objects and provides a script host with a built-in reporting framework.
  
  It is composed of the following 3 components; a debugging service, a debugger host, and the user interface.
  
  The Debugging Service
  The debugger service (DbgSvc.exe) performs the following tasks:
  
  Attach/Detach the host to processes
  Collect performance monitor data
  Implement HTTP ping to detect hangs
  Inject leak monitor in running processes
  Collect debugging session state information
  Shows the state of each rule defined
  
  The Debugger Host
  
  The Debugger Host (DbgHost.exe) hosts the Windows Symbolic Debugger Engine (dbgeng.dll) to attach to processes and generate memory dumps. It also hosts the main analyzer module to analyze memory dumps. Dbghost.exe has no dependency on the service “DbgSvc.exe” and can be used separately.
  
  The User Interface
  
  The user interfaces (DebugDiag.exe and DebugDiagAnalysisOnly.exe) present an interface to analyze memory dumps, automate the creation of control scripts and show the status of running processes, including services.
  It is composed of 3 views:
  
  Rules: Creates control script for the debugger host through a wizard. The script is located under \scripts
  Advanced Analysis: Runs a selected “Analysis Script” against one or more memory dumps.
  Processes: Shows status of running processes/services
  
  Note: DebugDiagAnalysisOnly.exe does not require elevation on operating systems beginning with Vista, so it only contains the Advanced Analysis view.

Files

Status: Deleted This download is no longer available on microsoft.com. The downloads below are archives provided by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the Microsoft Download Center prior to August 2020.

File	SHA1 Hash	Size
DebugDiag.msi	13cb8ed26570f7a21220623b639cbcbdf3bbcfb1	4.63 MB
DebugDiagx64.msi	6d07ec1ec6cf0fca8b74a642f37ed88aa0218dd2	8.93 MB

• Internet Explorer

• Usage:
  
  Generating Memory Dumps
  
  When using DebugDiag, you need to first identify what kind of issue you are troubleshooting (e.g. a crash, hang, slow performance, or memory and handle usage). This step will aid in configuring the tool appropriately to get the right data, and therefore identifying the root cause of the problem and resolving it.
  
  Process Crashes
  
  A process crash is usually indicative of an unhandled exception occurring in a process or code running in a process that actively terminates the process. To debug a process crash, start by creating a crash rule against the process(s) in question. Similar to previous debuggers, DebugDiag will attach to a specific process (s) and will monitor the process for multiple types of exceptions or any custom breakpoints that cause the process(s) to terminate unexpectedly. When the crash occurs, a full memory dump file will be created, in the directory specified when setting up the crash rule.
  
  Process Hangs or Slow Performance
  
  To debug a process hang, use one of the following:
  1-Create a hang rule. (this feature is available only for IIS processes) . The hang monitoring feature for IIS processes is designed to troubleshoot performance issues when users browse to pages in a web application and the pages take a long time to respond, or do not respond at all. During the hang rule creation wizard, specify the target processes to dump and a URL to be monitored along with a “Ping” interval and a response “timeout” The tools will send a request to the server at the configured intervals, and if the server does not respond before the configured timeout, a memory dump will be generated for the processes specified process(es).
  2-Create a manual memory dump during the slow or hang state by right-clicking the process name in the processes view and choosing the “Create Full Userdump” option.
  
  Memory or Handle Usage
  
  To debug memory and handle usage, use one of the following:
  1.Create a leak rule against the process in question. The leak monitoring feature will track memory allocations inside the process. Tracking is implemented by injecting a DLL (leaktrack.dll) into the specified process and monitoring memory allocations over time. When configuring a memory and handle leak rule, you can specify memory dump generation based on time or memory usage.
  2.Using the “processes” view, right-click the process in question and select the “monitor for leaks” option. When the process has grown to the suspected problem size, manually dump the process by right-clicking on the same process in the processes view and choosing the “Create Full Userdump” option.
  
  
  Analyzing Memory Dumps:
  
  One of the most powerful features of the DebugDiag is the ability to analyze memory dumps and generate a report file showing the analysis, along with recommendations to resolve identified problems.
  
  DebugDiag uses “Analysis Scripts” to analyze the process dump. 2 main analysis scripts are shipped with the tool:
  
  Crash/Hang Analyzers
  
  The crash/hang analysis script analyzes exception information in the dump for crashes if detected and analyzes known hang causes such as critical section related activity. This script includes IIS, MDAC, COM+ and Windows Socket information relevant to the process.
  
  Memory Pressure Analyzers
  
  The memory pressure analysis script analyzes the memory usage of the process and presents data gathered from the leak monitoring tool, when injected.