The application pool for this site was getting disabled quite frequently and we found quite a few entries like the following in the event log: Event Type: Error Event Source: W3SVC Event Category: None Event ID: 1002 Date: 19/11/2008 Time: 15:20:23 User: N/A Computer: <computername> Description: Application pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool In this case the customer already had some debugging skills so when he called CSS he already had a few dumps available to analyze; they were some process shutdown dumps (taken on Kernel32!TerminateProcess), strangely we had no second chance dumps (maybe because of one of these reasons?) but they’ve been a good point to start from anyway. First, let’s have a look at the exceptions: 0:000> !dumpheap -type Exception -stat [...]Statistics: MT Count TotalSize Class Name79333ed4 1 12 System.Text.DecoderExceptionFallback79333e90 1 12 System.Text.EncoderExceptionFallback79330d44 1 72 System.ExecutionEngineException79330cb4 1 72 System.StackOverflowException79330c24 1 72 System.OutOfMemoryException7931ffd4 1 72 System.NullReferenceException6610c7fc 1 84 System.Web.HttpUnhandledException79330dd4 2 144 System.Threading.ThreadAbortException79318afc 2 144 System.InvalidOperationException7931740c 5 160 System.UnhandledExceptionEventHandlerTotal 16 objects Remember, a few special exceptions are loaded when the AppDomain is first created (see here) so let’s try to see if there is still something significant…
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Where’s my dump gone?!?
Have you ever found yourself patiently waiting for a problem to reproduce with your debugger ready, and when it happens you just find there are no signs of your dump anywhere? If you are using adplus you likely had the text logs, but nothing more… In such situations it is possible that the OS is terminating the process before the dump is fully written. If you are tying to dump an IIS process and you want to save some time and headaches, try this small cunning: temporarily disable the “Enable pinging” and “Enable rapid-fail protection” flags in the Health tab for your application pool: Sometimes can be useful to tell IIS to not kill a failing worker process but rather leave it orphaned: Features of Worker Process Isolation Mode Orphaning Worker Processes You can configure worker process isolation mode to orphan a worker process that the WWW service deems to be failing. The WWW service usually terminates a failing worker process and replaces it. If you enable orphaning, the WWW service allows a failing worker process to continue running, but separates it from the application pool (making it an orphan) and starts a new worker process in its place. You…
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WPF, 3D and services: supported (again)?
I wrote about why GDI+ is not supported in a service a couple of years ago but this is still a debated topic (or I should better say a misunderstood topic), then WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) came into the game and it brought some more uncertainties with it. Recently I worked on a custom application which basically was meant to made of a Windows Form client and a WCF Web Service used to get some data from a database, create a 3D image (a sort of chart) and send it to the client as a jpg image; the graphic part was done using classes such as Viewport3D, PerspectiveCamera, ModelVisual3D, RenderTargetBitmap and others taken from the System.Windows.Media.* and System.Drawing namespaces. Everything was working fine as long as the project was being developed and debugged against the ASP.NET Development Server (Cassini), but when the project was deployed to IIS7 the image returned was missing the 3D part and the fancy transparency and shadow effects added through WPF classes, it merely had a blue background, nothing more. The first thing I thought to, are the differences between Cassini and IIS: the former is a process (not a service), it runs under the credentials…