How can I detect and DMP when there is a Heap Corruption on Release builds?

Question

So I've run into a seemingly random issue where my software is closing out (almost as if I clicked the X button). After some digging via Windows Event error reporting I realized this was because of a heap corruption.

Unfortunately, the issue seems to only happen under certain unknown conditions. It happens frequently in my production environment (once every 2-3 days, when my customers are using it), but has yet to happen to me while trying to debug the issue on my development environment.

I found this article, on how to find the source of the corruption... but enabling page heaps is causing the software to be unbearably slow (something I can't introduce into the production environment).

Visual Studio - how to find source of heap corruption errors

This is leaving me at a loss on what to do...

Does anyone have any other methods of detecting the source of a heap corruption in a production/release build that doesn't drastically effect performance? Ideally it detects the point of corruption, creates a DMP at the location in the code it occurred, and then continues with normal execution (even if that means crashing/closing out after the DMP is made).

For some context, this software is made using C++ and with Visual Studio 2022.

Answer 1

If you are sure that the problem is caused by heap corruption and want to collect dump files,I suggest you refer to the following steps.

1. Download Procdump:
2. Create a folder where the dump will be stored (e.g. C:\Dumps)
3. Unzip the compressed package and put procdump.exe in the created directory
4. Open the Windows command line: Click Start -> Run and type cmd. We recommend running cmd with administrative privileges (right click -> run as administrator), otherwise the utility may not find the required process;
5. In CMD, use the cd command to switch to the newly created folder:cd <path_to_folder> For example: cd C:\Dumps
6. Execute the following command to start ProcDump and capture heap corruption events:procdump -ma -h where is the process identifier (PID) of the target process, which can be found in Task Manager. The -ma parameter means to generate a full memory dump, and the -h parameter means to generate a dump file when heap corruption occurs.
7. Trigger heap corruption: Trigger heap corruption by running the target process or performing specific operations. Once a corruption event occurs, ProcDump will automatically capture and generate a dump file.
8. Download windbg to open the dump file, then use !analyze -v to analyze it.