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SQLDUMPER.EXE gone rogue
SQL2008 SP2, 100GB free on data drive. 9am I am selecting data through an ODBC provider to an IBM Unidata db and inserting through a linked server to SQL2005 SP3 db. After an hour I cancel the query, which takes 20min to cancel...4pm I start getting warnings about low disk space. I think an uncommitted transaction might be running amok--but there are none. Checking the processes I see SQLDUMPER.EXE executing every second. Checking the log folder I am surprised to see 40,000+ minidumps most 2-3MB in size, one about every second. Shortly thereafter the system shows 0 Free bytes on the HD. Not being comfortable rebooting with no free drive space I start deleting some of these, but fails due to 0 Free space. I have to purge some other cached files first, then delete some smaller files until I can start deleting these en masse. After rebooting everything was back to normal. I assume the problem was with me cancelling the query but why would MS allow a process to voraciously consume an entire drive? What possible useful information can be gleaned from 100GB of logs? Anyway, my question is has anyone else experienced this? What did you do and is it possible to disable that damn SQLDUMPER?
The fact that SQLDumper is running, means that SQL is producing a mini stack dump. The best approach is probably to look at one of these dumps and figure out what is causing SQL to stack dump. Microsoft support would be able to help you decipher the stack dump. There are ways of affecting the behaviour of SQLDumper, but these are best left to Microsoft support to direct you.
There are some trace flags but no way to really turn it off. The info in the stack dumps is not useful to me. It shows the query and some stack info but that's about it. The only time I've ever seen "an unexpected catastrophic error was returned" is this problem and writing some malformed PIVOT/UNPIVOT queries :) Thanks for the insight Kev
Hi; I had the same exact experience. We re-imaged an existing SQL server from 2000 to 2008R2. Yes, we should have done it many moons ago. In any case, Right now, as we speak, I have no SQL processes running on the server, but the dump was being created, filling the C:\ drive and killing everything. The content of the dump was indicating that something to do with the SQL Server Agent. So, I turned off the agent, without any effects. Next, I decided to stop the SQL server service. Cool, no more dumping; but, I could not re-start SQL server. I am stuck. Now, I am waiting Because I am running a few windows processes; and, I may not be able to reboot for another day or so. I will keep you posted when the reboot happens. I was suspecting that the reboot would fixes things. Working as a phone support, rebooting was the first line of attack.
The reboot did not help. We are re-imaging it again. Could it be hardware issue? Thanks
We re-imaged the server and it does it again. We are out of options. Any help would be appreciated.
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