An Easier Way To View Thread Wait Chains

Since Windows Vista the Windows operating system has included functionality to iterate across the waiting objects that form a chain between threads. I’m waiting for thread A, which is waiting for thread B, which is waiting for process Y. That sort of thing. Waits come in the form of EnterCriticalSection, WaitForSingleObject, WaitForMultipleObjects, etc. All documented in Microsoft’s Synchronization API. If you get these waits wrong, you can get deadlocks, or waits that wait forever. Either way, it’s game over for your program if that happens.

The Wait Chain Traversal API was added with windows Vista, but only made public recently. Prior to the API, access to the Wait Chain API was only via Resource Monitor, and more recently via Task Manager. A detailed article by a Microsoft field engineer, faik hakan bilgen, documents the history of the Wait Chain user interfaces and then provides a console program (with source code on github) to provide a wait chain dump to a text file. Unfortunately this isn’t very easy to use as it relies on decoding thread ids and process ids to understand what is happening. Also because it’s a text file, to get an update you need to run the tool again.

We decided to take inspiration from our Thread Status Monitor tool and create a version specifically for wait chains – Thread Wait Chain Inspector.

Select the process you are interested in in the upper window. Wait chains for each thread are shown in the window below. Select a thread and it and any related threads (in the same wait chain) will be highlighted in yellow. Deadlocked threads are shown in red. Process names are displayed and thread names are taken from the GetThreadDescription() API (Windows 10 only).

If you wish to debug a process you can create a minidump for any process in a wait chain. Right click on the process of interest in the wait chain and Create a Minidump….

Thread Wait Chain Inspector is a free tool, complementing our other threading tools, Thread Validator, Thread Lock Checker and Thread Status Monitor.