Background

A dump file (or crash dump) is what is created when a process contents are written to a file. This can happen automatically if the application has been set up to create them upon an exception or if the exception bubbles up to the underlying operating system.

If a DotNetNuke site is having an issue such as resource exhaustion or a memory leak, a site may want to create a copy of the current process contents so it can be investigated with a tool such as Windbg.

How to capture a dump

Via task manager

If the site is running on Windows vista/7/2008, then a dump file can be easily created by opening task manager and right clicking on the process and selecting "create dump file"

via adplus

As an alternative (and for other versions of the OS) a site may want to automate the capture of the dumps. To do this one option is to use the ADPlus.vb tool (part of the Microsoft debugging tools for windows) can be used to generate dumps for offline investigation.

use adplus to capture a process

adplus –crash –pn w3wp.exe

use adplus to capture process 1337 on an application hang

adplus –hang –p 1337

You can read more about how to use adplus here

via debug diag

The Debug Diagnostic Tool (debugdiag) is designed to assist in troubleshooting issues such as hangs, slow performance, memory leaks or fragmentation, and crashes in any user-mode process. The tool includes additional debugging scripts focused on Internet Information Services (IIS) applications, web data access components, COM+ and related Microsoft technologies.

Windows error reporting

The Windows Error Reporting (WER) feature that comes with Windows 2008 will automatically collect crash dumps of any process without any other tools.
Collect a Crash dump of an IIS worker process on IIS 7.0 (and above)