C++ application is slow after a crash (MSVS, Win8 x64)

Question

basically, I have a native C++ application which obviously crashed from time to time during code development. After fixing some bugs it runs rather smoothly. However, I noticed a rather weird behaviour which is very confusing to me.

It is a CMake-based project and I have an option of packaging the application into a zip file. When I run the executable from a freshly extracted zip - the application runs normally (and performance is high). However, say, if it crashes couple of times - the next start the behaviour is the same, but everything runs terribly slow. The test case I have (albeit manual) is very straightforward and I can repeat it easily.

Once the application is slowed down all I have to do is to rename the folder the application is located in and the performance rises again. Until it has crashed couple of times.

Obviously, this is not a problem once I get rid of the crashes. However, it seems to me that once the system (Win8.1 x64) detects persistent crashes it runs it in some different mode(?). And it looks like the app that I run from the IDE (MSVS2013) has received this "penalty". So it runs terribly slow even in release mode, let alone debug.

So I have a couple of questions to the community. First, have you ever observed such behaviour? Second, is the reason for slowdown indeed some system-wide information stored upon application crash? And finally, do you have an idea how to fix it?

Note: I could probably move the source folder to a different location, but it would require quite a lengthy rebuild step. Moreover, I'm just curious about what is going on. Also, system restart and full rebuild in the same folder didn't help.

Some context: the application uses Qt4 (also, Qt plugin system), MITK, ITK, VTK, CTK, OpenCASCADE, glew and related libraries all build from source on this machine.

Cheers, Rostislav.

Answer 1

Pretty much a year after asking this question, and having the problem "self-resolve", I think I found the answer and decided to post it here in case someone would run into similar problem.

It seems to me that my application was put by the system into the fault-tolerant heap (FTH) after several crashes. Some more information on FTH can be found on MSDN. It might make sense to disable the FTH on the developer machine (at least temporarily) when debugging a particularly nasty crash.