Greetings all,
I'm the developer of a rather large C# Windows Explorer extension. As you can imagine, there is a lot of P/Invoke involved, and unfortunately, I've confirmed that it's leaking unmanaged memory somewhere. However, I'm coming up empty as to how to find the leak. I tried following this helpful guide, which says to use WinDBG. But, when I try to use !heap, it won't let me because I don't have the .PDB files for explorer.exe (and the public symbol files aren't sufficient, apparently).
Help?
I've used many time UMDH with very good results. The guide you mentioned describing WinDbg uses the same method as UMDH, based on ability of debug heap to record stack traces for all allocations. The only difference is that UMDH does it automated -- you simply run umdh from command line and it creates snapshot of all current allocations. Normally you to repeate the snapshots two or more times, then you calculate 'delta' between two snapshots (also using umdh.exe). The information on the 'delta' file gives you all new allocations that happen between your snapshots, sorted by the allocation size.
UMDH also needs symbols. You will need at least symbols for ntdll.dll (heap implementation lives there). Public symbols available on public symbols from http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols will work fine.
Make sure you are using correct bitness of the umdh.exe. Explorer.exe is 64 bit on 64 bit OS, so if your OS is 64 bit you need to use 64 bit umdh.exe -- i.e. download appropriate bitness of Windows debugging tools.