Visual Studio Updater Says mspdbsrv is Running, Not According to Task Manager

Question

_{Monday, March 12, 2018 3:02 AM | 1 vote}

I've run into a rather concerning problem, in the sense of security flaw concerning. But it's also causing the Visual Studio installer/updater to give a Retry/Continue/Cancel message. Why is this process invisible to Task Manager at all, given it is running under MY user session?

All replies (3)

_{Tuesday, March 13, 2018 6:17 AM}

Hi 6XGate,

Welcome to the MSDN forum.

What’s your VS version?

>> Why is this process invisible to Task Manager at all, given it is running under MY user session?

Do you mean the mspdbsrv not display under Task Manager—Processes tab, but Users tab, Details tab or Services? If I misunderstand your meaning, please share the screenshot in here and that will help us to analysis this issue, thank you for your cooperation.

The Visual Studio uses MSPDBSRV.exe to generate the symbols (PDB files). All the requests related to creating, accessing or writing to PDB files are handled by mspdbsrv.exe. It is a helper service and sometimes it stays alive even after the build is over, for more detail information, please check this blog: My 2 cents on MSPDBSRV.exe and we can manually kill this process.

Best regards,

Sara

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_{Wednesday, August 29, 2018 8:29 PM}

Hi Sara, 

It seems it's not an isolated case.

>>> *Do you mean the mspdbsrv not display under Task Manager—Processes tab, but Users tab, Details tab or Services? *

Under the Details tab. I've found the process with ProcessExplorer and killed it manually but still it would be nice to be able to see it in the task manager considering I have administrator privileges and I can see pretty much every other process there. 

And also I realized the same way as 6XGate, by trying to update Visual Studio and waiting for mspdbsrv.exe to close only to see it wasn't there (but it was).

_{Sunday, April 28, 2019 5:20 AM | 1 vote}



It seems that mspdbsrv is hiding itself from us, developers.

It exists a few minutes after quitting VS, so you either need to wait. Or run Process Explorer.