My 2 cents on MSPDBSRV.exe

I read about MSPDBSRV.exe the other day for one of my cases. I found it interesting and thought of sharing it with you.

Here is how things work. 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. When a process issues a PDB request and mspdbsrv.exe is not alive, that process will spawn mspdbsrv.exe; but if mspdbsrv.exe is already alive, the living mspdbsrv.exe process will be used and no new process of mspdbsrv.exe will be spawned.

Sometimes it is possible that mspdbsrv.exe stays alive even after the build is over. In such scenarios, it is safe to add a post build event to kill the mspdbsrv.exe. For more information on post-build events, you can check this MSDN document.

Hope you found this small and informative enough (I know nobody likes to read long endless blogs)! Will try to be alive in MSDN blogs from now on. See you all.