What is the "create dump file" feature in Task Manager?

Question

Recently I came to find about a feature (option) by right clicking on process in Task Manager on Windows 10:

I want to know what does the feature stand for and what can I do with it?

Solution

It's a debugging tool for programmers.

It takes a snapshot of all the stuff that that program has stored in RAM and writes it to a file on disk. Programmers can then pore through that information to try to understand what went wrong.

Memory dumps (core dumps) are mostly useless unless you're a programmer with access to the source code of the program whose memory you dumped to disk.

Comments

[magicandre1981]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump

[Pandya]

Are memory dump and core dump same?

[firephil]

where is the file stored on windows 10 ?

[firephil]

Nevermind you have to wait until the process of file creation is finished. The process that i wanted to dump crashed before it could finish...

[James Harcourt]

@firephil You still have an option even when it is crashing. Use "WinDbg" (install with the Windows Development SDK) and use "WinDbg -I" to set it up as what's called the default "post-mortem" debugger. This means as your process is crashing, it will attach "WinDbg" to it. When WinDbg is attached, it is open and you can issue a command to grab a memory dump from it, so you can debug the crashing process.