Issue with WinDBG being incredibly slow

Hello! Not sure if this is the correct subforum, but since it's related to WinDBG I thought it was close enough.

I'm doing some helping out over at reddit's techsupport channel and a fair bit of that involves checking dump files. I have used the old WinDBG (From 2012, installed on Win7, kept the same install into a Win10 upgrade a year ago), but recently it was giving me some issues so I decided to install a new version. Just for completeness' sake, the old issue was that after doing .symfix and .reload, it would hang for about 5 minutes and then hang for another 5 minutes when repeating !analyze -v. The downloading symbols part would take about 15-20 seconds and then it would just hang. Checked through third party software that monitors internet usage. The old version would only use local symbols when you first loaded in a new dump file while (I think) the new version loads symbols from the Microsoft server automatically.

The new issue is that whenever I load in a dump file, it's slow beyond belief. It gets to this part and then it just slows to a crawl. It will output about one line every 5-10 minutes and it takes one hour before it's done and displays the information and I can enter any commands. If I try to exit out of WinDBG, the software will freeze, giving me a Windows prompt saying it's not responding. Use of the Break command, both through Ctrl+Break and Debug -> Break, has no effect.

It could be an issue with acquiring the symbols from the server. I have added WinDBG to my approved list in the Windows Firewall to no effect. I do use a third party tool called Netlimiter since my network speed is terrible and it's useful for weeding out processes that uses excessive internet at the wrong time. It's reporting that WinDBG uses 3-5 kilobyte/s for 1-2 seconds every 10 seconds while this is happening. The old version would max my internet speed for about 15-20 seconds after doing .symfix and .reload.

Symbol path: srv*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

EDIT: All my tests have been with minidumps (Small memory dump, 256kb).

Thank you for any help!

Hi Bjoolz,

First, you're symbol path is improper, because you don't tell where you want to download the symbols.
Please check step 3 of WinDBG - Install Configure - Windows 10 Forums

axe0 said:

Hi Bjoolz,

First, you're symbol path is improper, because you don't tell where you want to download the symbols.
Please check step 3 of WinDBG - Install Configure - Windows 10 Forums

I initially had the symcache portion, but removed it when it became obvious how slow it was since I never had it on my old install. Sorry for not mentioning it.

EDIT: I have now re-enabled it, copy pasting from the guide, and there is no change.

Of course there is no change, everything needs to be downloaded first what takes time.

Try what @Ztruker has done, WinDBG - Install Configure - Page 4 - Windows 10 Forums