Crash Dump Analysis
Windows only

by Dale Fugier (Last updated:  Wednesday, December 5, 2018)

Overview

If Rhino crashes, two files are created on the user’s desktop: RhinoCrashDump.dmp and RhinoCrashDump.3dm. The .3DM file is Rhino’s last ditch effort to save the model. The .DMP file can be used in Visual Studio to find the place in the source code where a Rhino plugin crashed.

Configuration

Before you can analyze crashes, you’ll need to set up visual studio to help you get symbols.

  1. Enable Symbol Servers
    1. Open Visual Studio
    2. From the Tools menu, click Options
    3. Select the Debugging > Symbols tab
    4. In the Symbol file (.pdb) locations box, add:
    5. Optionally add these symbol servers if you need symbols for OpenGL driver related crashes:
    6. In the Cache symbols in this directory folder enter a folder where Visual Studio will cache symbols. Depending on the number of crashes you debug, this folder can get quite large.
    7. Under Automatically load symbols for: select Load all modules, unless excluded (Note that this will make debugging your project slow. To speed this up, select Load only specified modules)

Debugging Crashes

  1. Download and extract the Zip archive containing the crash dump.
  2. Start Visual Studio 2017
  3. From the File menu, click Open
  4. Browse to the RhinoCrashDump.dmp file in the extracted folder
  5. Click Debug using mixed
  6. For details we’ve extracted about the crash, view the RhinoCrashDump.dmp.xml file.

Try it!

Below is a sample C++ plugin that will crash Rhino. To test out crash dump analysis:

  1. Download and build the TestSdkCrash plugin.
  2. Launch Rhino and load the plugin using the PlugInManager command.
  3. Run the TestSdkCrash command.
  4. While the McNeel Error Reporting dialog is displayed, copy the RhinoCrashDump.dmp from the desktop to some other location, and then click Don’t Send.
  5. Follow the steps above to analyze the crash dump.

Storing symbols

In order to get the most out of your crashes, you need to save the symbols and source code from each of the builds. You’ll also need to add source information into your PDB files before you store them in the symbol server.