Poor Program and Service Performance During Crash Dump Transfer

ID: Q203052

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Windows NT Server version 4.0
on the following platforms: x86
Microsoft Windows NT Server, Enterprise Edition version 4.0
on the following platforms: x86

SYMPTOMS

If a server stops responding (hangs) with a blue screen, the Savedump.exe process transfers the crash dump from the paging file to the Memory.dmp file during the next system startup. Other programs and services that are started during this process may perform poorly. If the server is providing services to users, those services may not provide timely responses to client requests.

CAUSE

This behavior can occur when the system is approaching an I/O-bound state while it is accessing disk resources. Paging file resources in particular may be exhausted because the paging file is used to transfer the crash dump to the Memory.dmp file.

RESOLUTION

To work around this behavior, configure a larger paging file to make sure that there is adequate space for the transfer to take place efficiently. Or, you may want to add additional drive and controller resources for the paging file to transfer the crash dump to the Memory.dmp file.

STATUS

This behavior is by design.

MORE INFORMATION

If you run Perfmon during this process, you may observe that the "%DiskTime" and "%Pagefile" values approach 100 percent while the Savedump process is running. The "Disk Queue length" and "Disk Transfers/sec" values also rise significantly. When the Savedump process finishes, the following event is logged in the System event log:

Savedump, 1001: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck...

Also, Savedump.exe is listed on the Processes tab in Task Manager during the transfer.

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q192463 Gathering Blue Screen Information After Memory Dump

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbenv
Version : winnt:4.0
Platform : winnt
Issue type : kbprb