Generating Dumps for Profiled Applications

Applies to AQTime 8.81, last modified on January 18, 2022

Generating Dumps

When profiling your application in AQTime, you may command AQTime to generate a dump for the profiled application. The generated file will contain information about the application’s memory, call stacks, loaded modules and CPU registers’ values. This information may help you understand what happens within the application at any given point in time. For instance, if your application hangs, you may generate the error report and use its data to find the cause of the problem.

To generate an error report:

  1. Click Generate Process Dump on the Event View panel’s toolbar.

    AQTime invokes the save file dialog.

  2. In the dialog, specify the location and name of the dump file and press Save.

    AQTime will save the dump to the specified file, post an informative message to the Event View panel and close the dialog.

  3. Then you can either continue profiling or terminate the profiled application.

You can also command AQTime to generate dumps automatically when an exception occurs in the profiled process. To do this, enable the Generate dump on exception setting of the Event View panel and specify the folder that the dumps will be saved in, in the Dump folder setting.

When an exception occurs in the profiled application, AQTime checks the value of the Generate dump on exception setting. If the setting is enabled, AQTime automatically generates a dump for the exception, saves the dump file to the folder, specified by the Dump folder setting and adds an informative message to the Event View panel. Note that the folder must exist; AQTime does not create it automatically.

If AQTime can determine the name of the profiled module, the dump name has the following format: Module_nn.dmp. Else, AQTime uses the AQTime project name, ProjectName_nn.dmp. In both cases, nn is a number (1, 2, 3 and so on).

Opening Dump Files

To analyze the data of a generated dump file, just double-click the corresponding informative message in the Event View panel. This will open the dump file in the associated application (for example, Microsoft Visual Studio). For more information on how to analyze dumps, see the documentation of the corresponding application.

Note: Currently, the generated dump file contains the “native-code” call stack. If you generated a dump for a .NET application, the dump will contain the native-code entries, but not the names of managed routines.

Remarks

  • Dumps are not generated for Java exceptions.

  • Dumps are not generated for exceptions that are filtered out based on the Event View’s Exceptions filter options and not logged in the panel (see Exceptions in the Event View Panel).

  • When a .NET exception occurs, the CLR generates the appropriate system exception. The dump file contain the call stack for this system exception. It does not contain the call stack for the .NET exception.

See Also

Collecting Results During Profiling
Event View Panel Settings

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