Minidumps

When debugging crashes, you can use a crash dump to find out what happened. It’s like a video game “save game” file. A debugger can then load the dump, and it’s as if you had just encountered the crash with the debugger attached.

This way you can load and inspect crashes from other people.

Think about what kind of data you need to make this happen: call stack, state of registers, state of all threads, contents of memory, etc. Now that we have gigabytes and gigabytes of memory in the average device, these crash dumps get large. We don’t need all of it to debug most issues.

On Windows there is a “minidump”, which “contains the smallest amount of useful information that could help you identify why your computer failed”. Microsoft also calls these “small memory dump files”. You can configure what kinds of dumps your system dumps by default at the operating system level.

More broadly, these are referred to as user-mode memory dumps.