IIS crashes and restarts without dropping a mini-dump

Question

I have a tough scenario I'm trying to debug... On a web forms page, when I click submit, the web server hits some error and restarts the w3svc process.

I do not see any stack trace dumped to the event log. The only entry in the Windows Application Log is:

Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 7.5.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bd0eb

Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bdfe0

Exception code: 0xe053534f

There is no mini dump created for me to attach windbg to...

Any ideas how to debug my issue?

Answer 1

I suspect that you make a loop call like

public string sMyText
{
   get {return sMyText;}
   set {sMyText = value;}
} 

and you call the sMyText

or something like

protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
{
  base.OnInit(e);
}

or something like

Server.Transfer("TheSamePage.aspx");

In this cases the crash is not call the minidump. Can you run the process explorer and see if your pool is eat the cpu until is crash ?

Answer 2

To create a memory dump for a crashing application, you can use either DebugDiag or adplus. Either will monitor the process, and generate a dump file when the crash occurs. DebugDiag can also analyze dump files and generate an issue report (similar to the "!analyze -v" command in WinDbg.)

DebugDiag can be downloaded here.

You should find adplus installed with the Debugging Tools for Windows - which is the same installer that contains WinDbg.

Answer 3

I would use something like Procdump to get a memory dump when the process terminates and look for exception and call-stack.

-t Write a dump when the process terminates.

FYI...what you see in EventViewer is Watson buckets which tells which application and module had an unhandled exception. From your log it looks like kernelBasewas the faulting module.