What would be the cause of this worker process crash?

Question

We experienced a worker process crash in our ASP.NET 2.0 application.

Here is the report that was dumped when the worker process crashed:

Version=1
Event         


        

Answer 1

The clue to this problem is in the Exception Code:

Sig[6].Name=Exception Code
Sig[6].Value=e053534f      <====== this is the clue

This exception code indicates that there was a "soft stack overflow" raised by the CLR. Please see the commentary at the end of this MSDN Library article:

StackOverflowException Class

What you'll need to do is install the Debug Diagnostic Toolkit and configure it to dump your worker process whenever this crash happens.

Once you've captured a dump of the process you'll need to load this into WinDBG and use SOS to narrow down the root cause.

There are several great articles on how to analyse a worker process crash dump:

.NET Debugging Demos - Information and setup instructions - Tess Ferrandez

Diagnosing Tricky ASP.Net Production Issues with DebugDiag and winDbg

System.StackOverflowException with IronPython 2.6.0 and 2.6.1

The articles by Tess Ferrandez are great and I learned to master WinDBG and SOS from her labs.