Does your Web Application on Production Servers Crash Unexpectedly?

Hello Friends!

Have you ever faced a situation wherein your web application running on your production server undergoes a hard crash?

Lets say you haven’t seen such an issue, still its better to know what to do in such cases.

Concept Understanding:

When any application crashes in the Development environment, its easy to understand where could the fault be. Yea yea… obviously because we have the Facility to Debug the Written Code! 😉

We can write code, fix code replace the code with altogether a new one and try out various ways and means to optimize the code as much as possible.

But think of a condition, where your Live Production Application crashes unexpectedly… (OMG!)

Oh Dear! You don’t have the slightest clue where to start from. Neither do you have the debugging environment to understand where the issue is…

What you feel is: Oops What’s this? and what do I do! 🙁

How and where to look for?

Application Logs

First and foremost you need to look into your application logs, for some Unhandled Exceptions (or recursive loops incase that info is available in logs).

Event Logs

In case of any Errors in ur application, they will surely be available in the Applications Tab of Windows Section in Event Logs

You can also take a look at the Systems Tab. It maybe the case that your application wasn’t the problem, but the environment — say IIS crashed or some config change or unknown IIS reset — was.

Create a Crash Dump of your application

This is a difficult yet the best option.

But please go ahead with this option in case you can’t find the solution of a problem anywhere on net and even you don’t have the slightest idea what could have led to this!

Lets say how can a crash dump help. Even if your application had crashed, the worker process may have stopped responding to the various requests, but still it will be available in the Memory.

There are various tools available that would help you create a crash dump of your application (Manual Dump).

IIS 7.5 has a facility of creating a Dump File in case your application undergoes a hard crash and yes, the location will be available from the Event Logs.

Now, on analyzing the crash dump, you would surely get the point in your application where the problem exists!

Hope this helps you solve your Application Crash!

A simple and great article written by Kiran Patil some time back: http://sitecorebasics.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/does-your-cd-servers-crash/

Happy Analyzing! 🙂