Minidump creates empty dump file

Question

We have an in-proc crash handler which is using MiniDumpWriteDump() from DbgHelp to write a minidump is case of a process crash. I know its not the best way to do it, however, at the moment we do not have other option.

The problem is: one certain executable always creates 0 byte dumps. But it works well for other processes. What could be the possible reason behind this behavior?

Answer 1

We had this problem from time to time with our minidumping code. In the end we changed it to spawn a lightweight secondary process on startup and used a simple MMF to communicate with the dumper process when we needed a minidump generated.

We had all sorts of problems using MiniDumpWriteDump from within the process being dumped. Since the change to a dedicated dumping process, it's been very reliable.

If at all possible I suggest you consider the same. It ended up not being that much work.