Analysing crash dumps

Crash dumps, also referred to as memory dumps or core dumps, are diagnostic files containing a variety of information about a program state that help developers identify and troubleshoot bugs, crashes and general issues. Their name and content can vary depending on the information they include, and the state of the program while they were captured. Memory dumps, despite the name, are not limited to memory, but normally include registers, stacks, threads information, callstacks and more. Core dumps are normally taken when a single process crashes, while Full Memory dump, or System Dump, captures everything in the target scope, such as full virtual memory of the process. Minidumps, on the other hand, contain a smaller subset of information, enough to do stack trace analysis. These names are often used interchangeably, and each operating system calls them a bit differently. While they are referred to as crash dumps, as they are often taken when an application crashes, they can be taken at