Thread Validator - Feature List

Thread Validator has many useful features not found in other synchronization analysis tools.

Deadlock Detection

Detect deadlocks
Detect potential deadlocks
Detect bad lock strategy
Detect miscellaneous errors:
- Entering uninitialised critical section
- Leaving an unlocked critical section
- Deleting a locked critical section
- etc
Get complete stacktraces for deadlocked threads

Data Views

Locks summary view. Shows summary information for each critical section in the application. Colour coding indicates various error conditions
Per thread locks view. Shows information about each critical section for each thread in the application. Colour coding and text messages indicates various error conditions
Current locks view. Shows information about locked and waiting critical sections for each thread in the application. Colour coding and text messages indicates various error conditions
Active objects view. Shows information related to the creation, usage and destruction of synchronization objects. Miscellaneous locking errors are reported on this tab
Analysis view. View information on all critical sections and their related objects and actions
Threads view. Graphically view the state of the threads in your application
Objects view. What types of objects are in use and how many
Diagnostic messages. For detecting unforseen errors in the instrumentation. If things are not behaving as you expect, the answer may be here

Data searches

Lock Order Display. Displays locks in the order acquired
Synchronization object search
Synchronization object query
Synchronization address query
Function query
Single thread critical section detector
Display stack traces for all threads, including deadlocked threads. This option uses proprietry stack walking algorithms to obtain stack traces that, if viewed in the debugger, would be very short

Data Management and Filtering

Miscellaneous

Support for software with no debugging information, via exported symbols, def files, ordinals, map files, and browser (bsc) files.
Very configurable, almost all options are configurable by the user. Includes an option to reset to the default settings.

Startup

Start by injecting into running process.
Start by launching a process and injecting into that process at startup.
Start by waiting for a process to start and injecting into that process at startup.
Link to service binary to use Thread Validator with your NT Service.

Instrumentation

Instrumentation is fast, a few seconds, not tens of minutes.
Runs at nearly full speed of non-instrumented application, not 2 or 10 times slower.
Instrumentation can be customized at the DLL level or down to the function level, as you require. Completely flexible as to which functions you choose to instrument.

No need to rebuild

No need to rebuild or relink your application.
Minimal compile and link to use Thread Validator with NT services. This is required to because the windows security model does not allow process handles to be opened on service processes by processes other than the service.

Compatibility

Operating Systems

Please note that the 32 bit Thread Validator will work on 64 bit operating systems (with 32 bit applications)