An associate of mine helped to expose this .dmp file content (similar content it multiple .dmp files):

Exception code 0xC0000005

The thread tried to read from or write to a virtual address for which it does not have the appropriate access.

Unhandled exception at 0x001A03BB (mercury.exe) in 181024-100247.dmp (interesting that this is the source .dmp file).

Access violation reading location 0x062DBCF0.

Hi All,

Would someone please explain .dmp files? 

• I have a significant number (at least one per month, sometimes several)
• They're not readable with a text editor so I don't know their content or value
• I don't know what is causing their creation but the time stamp of a small percentage of them corresponds with the daily maintenance task
  

TIA!

.dmp files are memory dumps that can be loaded in Microsoft Visual Studio for debugging. They are created if the program terminates unexpectedly.

Thanks Rolf.  I don't have Visual Studio so will study the frequency a bit more for clues and to try to get a sense of whether there is cause for alarm.  Is there an explanation for the ones that are zero byte sized?  There is a number of those.

[quote user="Rolf Lindby"]They are created if the program terminates unexpectedly. [/quote]

But the daily maintenance task should not be an unexpected termination, isn't it?

We never used the daily maintenance because I have to restart our Windows Server anyhow at least once a month during MS update day. The other times Mercury is normally running incident-free. Nevertheless just searched for any dmp files but didn't find any.

[quote user="Joerg"]But the daily maintenance task should not be an unexpected termination, isn't it?[/quote]

That's what I would have thought but many of the zero byte .dmp files are time stamped at this time.

[quote user="Joerg"]We never used the daily maintenance because I have to restart our Windows Server anyhow at least once a month during MS update day. The other times Mercury is normally running incident-free. Nevertheless just searched for any dmp files but didn't find any.[/quote]

I've turned off the restart associated with the daily maintenance task to see what happens.

Interestingly, there is now a zero byte .dmp file time stamped at the time I shutdown Mercury late yesterday afternoon for backup purposes.  That certainly should have been a graceful shutdown.

Depending on why the program terminates it may not be possible to create a memory dump, so the file can sometimes be empty.

I haven't used daily restarts myself, but perhaps if the restart breaks an ongoing transaction in one of the protocol modules it could trigger a memory dump.

I attempted to read one of the .dmp files but need a symbol file (.pdb).  Is it available?  Please let me know if it is unlikely that I would know what I was looking at even I had the symbol file (I'm a user, not a coder).