Application monitoring

Alessandro — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:49:02 +0000

I’ve been asked if there’s a way to programmatically determine if an application crashed in order to restart it; the answer is, of course, yes. To accomplish this task, you have to create the process with a launcher that acts like a debugger; your application only needs to check the exit code of the process whenever it receives an EXIT_PROCESS_DEBUG_EVENT event (you can also check for unrecoverable exceptions).

Here’s the pseudo-code:

DEBUG_EVENT deDebugEvent;
...
WaitForDebugEvent(..);
...
// Check the event type
switch(deDebugEvent.dwDebugEventCode)
{
	...
	case EXIT_PROCESS_DEBUG_EVENT:
	{
		// We assume that if the program exited with a nonzero code, it crashed
		if (deDebugEvent.u.ExitProcess.dwExitCode)
		{
			// The program crashed
			DebugActiveProcessStop(...);
			CreateProcess(...);
			...
		}

		// Clean exit
		ExitProcess(0);
	}
	...
}

Source code: http://www.insanedevelopers.net/downloads/Sources/ApplicationMonitor.zip

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Application monitoring