hanged process in windows xp

eusto

Is there a way of knowing (through an application's code)if a process is still running or it hanged? I'm trying to design a watchdog that has to monitor some processes. Except for killing/starting them, i have no other access to these processes. Thanks

Hamid Taebi

Can you see them on the Task Manager and did you test ProcessMonitor?

eusto

I can, the problem is that those processes might hang and i need to know when this happens and restart them from a watchdog.

bkelly13

If you can write code for the critical process, have it send a message to your watchdog on a regular basis. If the watchdog misses two or three messages, it kills and restarts the process. If you do not have access to the code, you will have to look for something the process does on a regular basis and maybe key off that. What does it do that makes it critical? That may help you find something to monitor. Can you write code to check the program counter? Where is the PC when the process hangs. What about I/O count?

Thanks for your time

eusto

bkelly13 wrote:

If you can write code for the critical process, have it send a message to your watchdog on a regular basis. If the watchdog misses two or three messages, it kills and restarts the process. If you do not have access to the code, you will have to look for something the process does on a regular basis and maybe key off that.

Thank you. Actually this answers my question. I was wondering if there was some kind of an OS/kernel way of testing if a project is still active or not. I've done some reading and didn't find any reference to what i needed. The options you've posted above gave me the answer i was looking for. Thanks, Eugen