As a software engineer, it is by no means uncommon to have to debug a program that leaks memory or eventually crashes. These problems can be very difficult to track down, I know. But if you can have a clear view of exactly what resources the program is using, you may be able to track down the problem more quickly.
Just last week I was faced with a nasty crash that occurred 20 minutes into execution, almost without fail. My initial inclination was that GDI handles were not being released correctly to the operating system. But, how was I going to verify for sure that this was actually the problem? Well, that’s when I discovered the sheer usefulness of Process Explorer.
Process Explorer is one of the many members of the Sysinternals tools suite. It is a wonderful addition to the traditional Windows task manager, offering loads of extra information. One can determine DLLs and other files that are currently in use by each process, view process-specific memory usage and CPU graphs, dig into all running threads and view their call stacks, TCP/IP connections from each process and their current state, all types of handles, I/O data, virtual memory, kernel and user time, and tons of other information. It is an absolutely unbelievable collection of helpful information for application developers.
Process Explorer download page
Tags: process explorer, freeware, free software, programmer tools, debug
