How do you synchronize updates to a Windows symbol store? [duplicate]

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Serialize execution of symstore via Powershell or BATCH (3 answers)

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I'm considering to set up a symbol store for our team and extend our packaging infrastructure so that debug symbols automatically get added to the store. The idea was that once a build is finished, we run symstore on the build directory and have it merge all the .pdb files into the symbol store. In principle, this appears to be fairly straightforward to do but there's one issue:

The page on using SymStore explains that

SymStore does not support simultaneous transactions from multiple users. It is recommended that one user be designated "administrator" of the symbol store and be responsible for all add and del transactions.

This is a problem because we have plenty of build machines, and it's perfectly possible that two (independant) builds finish at roughly the same time and hence try to update the symbol store in parallel.

I can think of various ways to ensure that there's always only one symstore process updating the symbol store, but before I roll my own synchronization method I wonder:

Is there a (quasi) standard or very conventional way of updating a symbol store in a way which ensures that there aren't multiple concurrent transactions? In particular, it appears that it's possible to write your own symbol store creation program, maybe there's a popular alternative which does handle synchronization using some sort of lock or so? I imagine other teams must have hit (and hopefully) solved this problem already.

Answer 1

I ended up writing a little utility withlockfile which I can use to synchronize adding transactions to the symbol store. The idea is that instead of

symstore add ... /s \\myserver\symbols

I wrap the invocation in a withlockfile call which will suspend until it can acqure a lock file. The lock file is stored in the actual symbol storage. So my above call becomes

withlockfile \\myserver\symbols\lockfile.txt symstore add ... /s \\myserver\symbols

This command is executed after our builds, since all withlockfile calls use the same (shared) lock file, no two symstore invocations run concurrently.