How to grab a full memory dump of a large memory usage

I am hosting IIS based web service applications on Windows 2008 64-bit system running on a Quad core 8G machine. Ran into couple of instances when W3WP was running at 7.6G of memory usage. Nothing else was responding on the system including RDP. Right click on the process from the task manager and creating the dumps, froze the system and all its threads for a long time (close to 30minutes). When the freeze up occurred during off hours, we let the dump run for a while (ran close to 1 hour) but still dump didn't complete. In the interest of getting the system up, we had to kill IIS

Tried other tools like procexp, debug diag etc to create full memory dump and all have the same results

So, what tool does the community use to grab dump files quickly? Or without freezing all the threads? I realize latter might be a rhetorical question. But what are the options for generating开发者_JAVA百科 such a large dump file without locking up the system for a long time?

IMO you shouldn't have to wait until the process memory grows to 8 GB. I am sure with something like 3 - 4 GB you should be able to detect the memory leak.

Procdump has an option based on memory threshold

-m Memory commit threshold in MB at which to create a dump of the process.

I would you this option to dump the memory of the process.

And also SSD would help in writing faster.

WPA a.k.a xperf (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx) is a powerfull tool, to diagnose the applications. You will get call stack of the culprit allocation. You dont have to collect the dump and it is no-invasive and does not load much in production systems

Complete step by step information is available here. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff190906(v=VS.85).aspx.