Introduction When you have a call with a customer who explains to you that his application is crashing when your profiler is enabled, it is never a great experience. …

The .NET runtime (both .NET Framework and .NET Core) allows you to generate a lightweight dump containing the allocated type instances count and references including roots. They are usually generated into .gcdump files by tools such as Perfview or dotnet-gcdump and can also be viewed in Visual Studio. …

Introduction It’s been almost 12 years since I wrote LeakShell to help me automate the search of memory leaks in .NET. The idea was simple: compare 2 memory dumps of a leaking .NET application to show the types with increasing instances count. Today, you could use Visual Studio Memory Usage tool…

The previous episodes started the parsing of the “nettrace” format used when contacting the .NET Diagnostics IPC server, initiate the protocol to receive CLR events and start to parse stacks. This last episode covers the Metadata and Event blocks. In terms of format, both Metadata and Event blocks share the…

The previous episodes started the parsing of the “nettrace” format used when contacting the .NET Diagnostics IPC server and initiate the protocol to receive CLR events. It is now time to see how to get the payload of each “object” type, especially how stacks are stored. We have seen that…

The previous episodes explained how to contact the .NET Diagnostics IPC server and initiate the protocol to receive CLR events. It is now time to dig into the “nettrace” stream format! As the IPC command documentation states, the response to the CollectTracing command is followed by an Optional Continuation of…

As shown in the previous post, the processing of ProcessInfo diagnostic commands is easy because you send a request and read the different fields from the response. This is different if you want to receive events from the CLR via EventPipe. …

The previous post was describing the C# helpers to communicate with the diagnostic server in the CLR of a running .NET application. If, like me, you must write native code (i.e not in C#), you will need to implement the transport and protocol yourself. And, as you will see, it…

Introduction As I explained during a DotNext conference session, the .NET CLI tools such as dotnet-trace, dotnet-counter or dotnet-dump are communicating with the CLR thanks to Named Pipe on Windows and Domain Socket on Linux. Within the CLR, a diagnostic server thread is responsible for answering requests. A communication protocol allows…