Introduction

Process memory dumps are very efficient sources of information that are used for troubleshooting web sites, which is the reason they are frequently requested by Sitecore Support.

There are various tools that allow collecting the memory dumps of a specific process, based on a user request (on-demand), as well as on a specific event (conditional).

The current article describes the the easiest way to manually gather a full memory dump using the Windows Task Manager application.

For other methods of gathering memory dumps, refer to the following article:

• How to collect memory dumps

Gathering Memory Dump Files

To gather a memory dump using Windows Task Manager, perform the following steps:

• Identify the process (e.g. using process ID). Refer to the following article for details:
  How to identify process ID of appropriate Sitecore instance.
• When gathering memory dump files of 32-bit processes on 64-bit environments, before proceeding  refer to the section below .
• After getting the Process ID, navigate to the process, open the context menu, and choose an appropriate option:
•  After the memory dump is gathered, Task Manager will display a message box with a path to the result file. Move the file to other location in order to share it:
  

Gathering Memory Dump Files OF 32-Bit Processes

The default 64-bit version of Windows Task Manager version does not gather memory dump files for 32-bit processes that allow full debugging possibilities. Instead, the 32-bit version should be used. It is located here:

%WINDIR%\SysWOW64\Taskmgr.exe

Visually, it does not differ from 64-bit version, so it is important to ensure that the correct version is used.