Creating a watchdog to capture minidumps

Question

I'm trying to add the functionality of capturing mini-dumps when my program crashes. From what I've read, this is best achieved by use of another application (the watchdog) that is used to host the real application, and performs the dump.

From looking at posts such as this, I've come up with the following (both App and WatchDog are implemented in C++ using Win32):

• When the watchdog starts, it creates 2 events, an ExitedOk event, and an Exception event, both of which are set to be inheritable and aren't signalled. It also creates an inheritable file mapping.

• The watchdog then launches the "real app", and waits in a WaitOnMultipleObjects for either ExitedOk or Exception to be signalled.

• When the app starts, it creates the same 2 events (it will inherit the handles)

• The app is configured such that if it exits ok, it signals ExitedOk, or if an unhandled exception occurs, it stores the exception/thread info using the inherited filemapping, signals Exception, and then sleeps(Infinite).

• If the WaitOnMultipleObjects in the watchdog is signalled with an ExitedOk, nothing happens. If it is signalled with an Exception, then it reads the exception/thread info using the filemapping, and then calls MiniDumpWriteDump.

Clearly the Sleep() is an issue. Is this best resolved through another event? Such that the App waits until the watchdog signals some "FinishedCreatingDump" event?

Secondly, I thought that the whole point of the watchdog was so that you weren't doing any work in the crashed process that is potentially unstable? If I'm understanding the workflow correctly, and that you do indeed need the SetEvent/OpenFileMapping/MapViewOfFile in the process that actually crashed, isn't that just as bad as calling MiniDumpWriteDump from it?