0

I'm using a third party application that sporadically crashes when I perform a certain long running operation within the program. During this operation (which can last a couple hours or more) the program users a lot of memory and then releases a lot of it. Sometimes this operation works fine. Other times it crashes with the familiar "Do you want to send more information about the problem?" to Microsoft prompt.

The application itself has an exception handling routine that I have seen before but is not being activated during this particular crash. Because of this, the developer tells me that the crash is being caused by Windows running out of memory or stack space. I've increased the page file and I'm certain that there are cases where the crash has occurred and there has been plenty of system memory at the time of the crash.

The application is 64bit and I'm running on Windows 7 64 bit.

I've started monitoring the application using Process Monitor but it hasn't yielded any useful information.

How can I determine what is causing the crash? If Windows is crashing the app, wouldn't it log some info about the process and why it crashed? I see no other crashes from any other apps, just this one. How can I get to the bottom of this?

3
  • Can you try on another machine, how much RAM do you have on your PC? What is the application attempting to do, right to disk or query data or something?
    – Paul C
    Sep 20, 2011 at 21:26
  • 1
    If the application is running out of stack space, it's the developer's problem. Stack size is set at compile time.
    – Krumelur
    Sep 20, 2011 at 21:48
  • It's querying its local database (proprietary file based db) and processing data. I've got 8GB of RAM. It will consume a bunch sometimes - 12GB sometimes. Although the crashes often occur long before it starts using that much RAM.
    – Dave
    Sep 20, 2011 at 22:30

1 Answer 1

1

When Windows terminates a program, it does log pertinent info under the Application log in the Event Viewer.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .