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c#multithreadingdebugging
user186973
user186973

Reputation: 569

Debugging C# Threads

When I am working on multithreads how can I debug to know which thread causes an abnormal behavior?

Can I use permonitor for debugging, or are there any other tools or debugging facilities that are available?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 2528

Answers (6)

TrueWill
TrueWill

Reputation: 25523

As an alternative to debugging, you could do thread-related testing. The book The Art of Unit Testing has a section on this in Appendix B. The author mentions three tools (two of which he has a personal interest in):

Upvotes: 1

Jeremy
Jeremy

Reputation: 46350

How do you define abnormal behavior? Would that be an exception thrown? Not sure if this will help you but What I often do is name the thread object when I create it, then if I catch an exception or if certain criteria exists, I write to the event log. I include the time, the application name, the name of the thread and exception information. I don't just use it for debugging, I use it if a user complains about odd behavior or reports an error. Then I can go back and get information about it.

Upvotes: 1

ChrisF
ChrisF

Reputation: 137148

If you have several threads of the same type* you could modify your code to only run one of each type of thread (or perhaps put it in the application's configuration file so you can change it quickly while debugging).

If the application still misbehaves then you know that it's an interaction between the different types of thread that's causing the problem. If it doesn't then it could be that there's some resource you've not thread locked properly (for example).

What I'm trying to say is simplify you application to the point where it's using the minimum number of threads to still be your original design.

* Not the best word to use, but for example if you spawn 10 threads to deal with file i/o only spawn 1.

Upvotes: 1

Hannoun Yassir
Hannoun Yassir

Reputation: 21192

Upvotes: 2

Moshe Levi
Moshe Levi

Reputation: 3493

It depends what do you mean by "abnormal behavior"...

for most of the time, the visual studio debugger should be enough. the Threads and CallStack windows will give you a lot of information about what is going on.

for the heavy duty stuff you can use WinDbg+SOS. read about the !threads, !threadpool and !runaway commands.

Upvotes: 1

George Stocker
George Stocker

Reputation: 57877

You can use visual studio to set up breakpoints on certain threads. See here and here for how to do it.

Upvotes: 1

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