Creating a dump file is excruciating slow

Question

Brief

Creating a dump file using any of the following methods is way to slow (> 2 minutes) to be usable for our current scenario.

• procdump -ma notepad
• procdump notepad
• Open task-manager, select notepad, create dump file

Does anyone have any idea

• what might be causing this
• how to possibly speed this up

Edit: some extra information

• Using procexp and looking at the call stack dumping notepad, it seems to be taking 100% cpu of one core in a method from dbghelp: dbghelp.dll!MiniDumpReadDumpStream+0x241a

fortunatly, we tried this first with notepad

Background

We are trying to create a dumpfile on a first-chance exception of a critical application with as minimal impact as possible. The application should not get suspended for more than a few seconds.

Answer 1

In the end, this turned out to be related to the combination of our AV and a specific dbghelp.dll version.

Tested combinations

• AV Enabled with dbghelp version 6.0 is way to slow
• AV Disabled with dbghelp version 6.0 is no problem
• AV Enabled with dbghelp version 6.3 is no problem

Answer 2

From your description, it sounds like you may be requesting a full heap dump (.hdmp). Full dumps tend to take longer. If this is a one-off exercise, you can probably benefit from capturing a minidump. Otherwise, you would need to integrate a crash reporting strategy into your application.