CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.netdebuggingwindbg
w0051977
w0051977

Reputation: 15817

WinDBG - Symbols path not included

I am trying to trace a possible memory leak in a very large ASP.NET application. I am trying to familiarize myself with WinDBG before attempting to use this tool in the live environment.

I have followed the instructions in the following article, which I found very helpful: http://humblecoder.co.uk/uncategorized/spotting-a-memory-leak-with-windbg-in-net. I am able to create a "memory dump" file of the ASP.NET process and show that the delegate is causing the memory leak as specified in the article. I refer to the paragraph in the article that starts: "Next we need the symbols". I did not add the symbol files using File\Symbol File Path; in WinDBG and yet I still seem to be able to debug the application and follow through the remaining steps of the article. Are symbol paths not required with an ASP.NET application?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 279

Answers (2)

Brian Rasmussen
Brian Rasmussen

Reputation: 116471

As Michael says symbols are not strictly necessary for managed code as most of the relevant information is available at runtime as metadata, but if you're digging into native code it is very useful to have symbols.

For many scenarios you can just do .symfix which will tell WinDbg to use Microsoft's public symbol server. That will give you access to symbols for all the CLR and Win32 specific calls in your code. Remember to do a .reload if you set the path.

If your code includes native non-Microsoft assemblies as well, you need to append the location of the corresponding PDB files to the symbol path. Use the .sympath command for that.

To troubleshoot symbol loading use the !sym noisy command.

For more information see this.

Upvotes: 1

Michael Liu
Michael Liu

Reputation: 55499

Because .NET assemblies contain metadata, including the name of every method and its parameters, symbols aren't necessary to obtain a readable stack trace of a managed thread.

One thing symbols can provide is the file name and line number of each statement, so you can more easily figure out which frames in the stack trace correspond to which lines in your source code.

Upvotes: 2

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