Wait Chain Traversal

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Wait Chain Traversal (WCT) enables debuggers to diagnose application hangs and deadlocks. A wait chain is an alternating sequence of threads and synchronization objects; each thread waits for the object that follows it, which is owned by the subsequent thread in the chain.

A thread waits for a synchronization object from the time it requests it until it has acquired it. A lock is owned by a thread from the time the thread acquires it, until it releases it. Lock ownership is equivalent to the lock waiting for the thread to release it. Therefore, if thread 1 waits for a lock that is owned by thread 2, this is the same as saying that thread 1 waits for thread 2. WCT currently supports the following synchronization primitives:

  • ALPC
  • COM
  • Critical sections
  • Mutexes
  • SendMessage
  • Wait operations on processes and threads

To retrieve the wait chain for one or more threads, create a WCT session using the OpenThreadWaitChainSession and GetThreadWaitChain functions. WCT sessions are represented by a handle of type HWCT. Sessions can be either synchronous or asynchronous in nature. Synchronous sessions will block the calling thread until a wait chain has been retrieved. Synchronous sessions cannot be canceled. Asynchronous sessions do not block the calling thread and can be canceled by the application using the CloseThreadWaitChainSession function. Results from asynchronous operations are made available through a WaitChainCallback callback function provided by the application.

For asynchronous sessions, the caller can specify a pointer to a context data structure through GetThreadWaitChain. The same pointer is passed to the callback function. This context data structure is user-defined and opaque to WCT. It can be used by the application to communicate context between a WCT query and a callback function. A common approach is to pass an event handle through this structure; when the callback is executed, it signals this event and informs some monitoring thread that the query has been completed.

Using WCT

WCT Reference