How to find out more about Application Hang event?
If a VB6 app is causing an Application Hang event to appear in the Event Viewer, how can I find out more about why the application is hanging?
Does an Application Hang event mean that the app has frozen and crashed, or just that it temporarily hangs?
All I get in the event log for this event is:
Hanging application [MyAppName].exe, version [MyAppVersionNo], hang module hungapp, version 0.0.0.0, hang address 0x00000000.
That is not enough and I want to be able to find out more about why it is hanging. What code changes or other steps need to be taken to cause the app to provide more details in the event log?
Answer
I recommend using the Windows Performance Toolkit. The best version to use is in the Windows Assessment & Deployment Kit, http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28997
Once it's installed, what you do is start up Windows Performance Recorder (WPR) and click the Start button to begin recording. Next, reproduce the problem with your app. Then go back to WPR and press the Save button. Next, load up Windows Performance Analyzer and open that *.ETL file that was generated. Then you want to go to System Activity section in the Graph Explorer, expand it, and find the UI Delays graph (or it might be the first graph parked on System Activity). Double click on it to get the detailed version in an Analysis tab.
Once you find the UI delay you're interested in, you can add another graph such as CPU Usage (Sampled) from the Processing node in Graph Explorer. When the two graphs are in the same Analysis tab, their scrolling and selection will be synchronized. So you can click on the UI delay event and it will also highlight the corresponding range in CPU Usage.