February 6th, 2015

Use GFlags to catch the silent killer (silent but deadly)

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

Suppose you have some process that is mysteriously dying and you can’t figure out why. You think that some other process is doing a Terminate­Process but heck if you can figure out who that is.

Starting in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the GFlags tool will let you catch these miscreants.

On the Silent Process Exit tab, you enter the program you want to keep an extra eye on and check the box Enable Silent Process Exit Monitoring and select what you want to happen when one of these mysterious exits occurs. You can ask for an entry in the event log that identifies the killer, and you can ask for debugging minidumps to be created of both the killer and the victim.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Code

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

0 comments

Discussion is closed.

Read next