mspdbsrv.exe living forever?

Question

Is there a way to prevent mspdbsrv.exe from continuing to run after finishing the compilation? or even after I terminate visual studio? or perhaps even prevent it from even spawning in the first place?

what is this guy good for anyway?

using vs2005

Answer 1

MS recommends to add a postbuild-event to the Project options here.

[...]Sometimes it is possible that mspdbsrv.exe stays alive even after the build is over. In such scenarios, it is safe to add a post build event to kill the mspdbsrv.exe.

Background infos on postbuild-Events can be found on the linked page.

Answer 2

mspdbsrv.exe is the process Visual Studio uses to create .pdb files when you compile; these are the symbol files that let you debug an application. Sometimes it goes berserk and doesn't shutdown correctly when you exit Visual Studio. I've had this cause bad compiles even after quitting and restarting Visual Studio. Use Process Explorer or the task list (Ctrl+Alt+Delete in Windows) to manually kill mspdbsrv.exe if it's broken on you.

For what it's worth, I haven't seen this problem happen in Visual Studio 2008 as of yet, but I've only been using it a few days.

Answer 3

A little googling seems to indicate that mspdbsrv.exe zombies are a known issue in VS2005. We've had similar (intermittent) problems, but there did not seem to be a solution.

Yes, it sucks.