Help us debug Sumatra hangs or crashes
If Sumatra crashes or hangs reliably on your machine but we can't reproduce it ourselves, you can help us by debugging it. Here's a tutorial on how to do it.
Please first test with latest pre-release version from https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/prerelease.html
Some bugs might already be fixed there compared to latest
Those instructions require SumatraPDF 3.2 or later.
We log information that might be helpful in debugging issues in memory. Sometimes we might ask you to send us logs.
To see the logs: press Ctrl + K (Command Palette), type show log
This saves current logs to a file and opens default .txt editor with log file.
- Install WinDBG debugger from Microsoft Store at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windbg-preview/9pgjgd53tn86#activetab=pivot:overviewtab. Alternatively, you can follow instructions from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/debugger-download-tools
- In SumatraPDF, use menu
Debug/Download symbols. Symbols are important for the debugger (like WinDBG) to resolve addresses to names that
First, vocabulary. %ProgramFiles% means the standard directory where Windows installs programs. It's c:\Program Files on 32-bit Windows and c:\Program Files (x86) on 64-bit Windows.
To debug crashes:
- start SumatraPDF.exe under the control of WinDBG
- start WinDBG.exe
- File/Open (Ctrl-E), find and open SumatraPDF.exe executable
- In WinDBG, type:
.sympath+ SRV*c:\symbols*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbolsg
- when Sumatra crashes, type:
!analyze -vand paste the result of that to the bug report
Here are the steps to follow if Sumatra hangs
- Start SumatraPDF.exe and get it to hang
- start WinDBG.exe
- use File/Attach to process (F6) and select SumatraPDF.exe from the
- In WinDBG, type:
7.1) .sympath+ SRV*c:\symbols*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
7.2) ~*kb
7.3) lmf
Attach the output to bug report.