What conditions does the IIS crash agent look for?

I'm thinking of using the IIS crash agent to help recover an intermittent
failure we have with our web servers.

From what i've read in the documentation, the iis crash agent looks for
hangs in the inetinfo process. If my virutal directory is set to medium
isolation and gets loaded into iis-out-of-process, will the crash agent
still detect a hang in this process? Or do i need to set the isolation for
the virtual directory to low?

The hangs manifest themselves as a series of 401 errors in the web logs and
an inability to serve ASP content (for the specific VD that has crashed),
other virtual directories run fine during this time, even for asp's.

Anyone got any knowledge on using the crash utility?

yonlinemanghn
Wed Apr 28 12:51:36 CDT 2004

Hello,
The IISCrashHang Agent is used for obtaining dumps for
a) Crashes
b) Hangs

In case of crash issues, all you need to do is run the command "iisdump.exe
-i -o <output directory for dumps>" and wait for the issue to occur. When
any IIS process (in process or out of process) crashes, you will have dumps.

In case of hang issues, you have a few options:
1) Configure the iischagent.ini to automatically get dumps based on the
time it takes for any page to serve up. You can set the requesttimelimit to
a value that indicates a hang. A sample configuration in the iischagent.ini
is
[HangAgent]
Enable=1
LogLocation=c:\iisdebugtools\logs
--------------> output folder for logs
MaxLogFiles=10
WriteLog=1
RequestTimeLimit=5 ---------------------> set this to a value high
enough to indicate a hang.
ActionCommand=c:\iisdebugtools\iisdump.exe -o <outputfolderwhichmustexist>
-------------------> output folder for dumps, event logs, etc
MaxActionsAllowed=1

2) At the time of the problem, obtain dumps manually by running the command
"iisdump.exe -d -o <output directory for dumps>"
3) At the time of the problem. obtain dumps manually by double-clickin on
the iisdump.exe file in C:\IISDebugtools

It doesn't matter what isolation (application protection) level your
application is running in. As long as you run the debugger in the
appropriate mode (crash or hang) depending on the issue you are seeing, you
will get dumps.
Please review the iischagent.rtf and iisdump.rtf files in the
C:\IISDebugtools folder.
Let me know if this answers your questions.


Thanks,
Yogita Manghnani
Microsoft Developer Support
Internet Information Server

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