windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis

windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis is a skill for Claude Code from microsoft/win-dev-skills. It costs 52 tokens per session (1,066 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A WinDbg workflow for tracing why a user-mode application, service, or driver host is not making progress. It follows waits through locks, COM or RPC calls, I/O, and other processes to find the blocker.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate unresponsive operations, identify the affected thread, map each wait to its owner, and distinguish blocked work from a spinning process.
Why use it?
The process showing the symptom may be waiting on another process, and a dump is only a snapshot rather than proof of a hang. The workflow avoids treating normal idle waits or one selected thread as the cause.

Skill for Claude Code ✓ vendor

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the windbg plugin — 11 skills, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate unresponsive operations, identify the affected thread, map each wait to its owner, and distinguish blocked work from a spinning process.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis
About the project

microsoft/win-dev-skills is a collection of AI-agent instructions and tools for creating native Windows applications with WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK. Windows developers use it to guide agents through app development tasks from scaffolding and design to testing, packaging, and release. The catalogue entries are its agents, skills, and plugin components.

microsoft/win-dev-skills · 472 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/win-dev-skills --skill windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/win-dev-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install windbg, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 2 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,066 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00052 $0.01066
Opus 5.5 $0.00021 $0.00426
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00010 $0.00213
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00107

Measured 8d ago against content hash 90e7aa94c93a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/windbg/skills/windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis/SKILL.md · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cross-Process Wait Chain Analysis

Load windbg-diagnostic-method first if it is not already loaded in this conversation, and apply it throughout for evidence ranking, hypothesis testing, confidence calibration, independent review, and report validation. This skill adds the bug-family-specific commands and evidence requirements.

Detection

Look for blocked work in an application, service, or user-mode driver host (including UMDF), and threads in wait, COM, RPC, or I/O paths. The process displaying the symptom may not own the underlying defect. Idle worker threads waiting normally are not evidence of a hang.

Workflow

1. Identify the affected operation and its thread

.lastevent
~*kb
!runaway

Confirm why the dump was collected. A dump is a snapshot; .lastevent does not by itself certify "hang" or "no crash." Identify the UI/serving thread from application evidence instead of assuming thread zero is always the UI thread. If work is spinning rather than blocked, collect appropriate CPU evidence.

2. Identify each wait and its owner

Inspect frames around WaitForSingleObject, WaitForMultipleObjects, COM send/receive, and RPC calls. Use matching symbols/source for your own proxy, interface, and server registration to determine what was requested.

For each edge record:

process / thread -> waited resource or request -> owner / serving thread

Do not guess a server PID from undocumented private COM layouts. Use available Wait Chain Traversal, RPC/COM tracing, application correlation IDs, or registration/process information, and explicitly mark unresolved edges.

3. Gather corresponding server evidence

Obtain authorized dumps or live state of the relevant server processes close enough in time to represent the same operation. Inspect their serving threads. For kernel context use documented commands such as:

!process 0 7
!thread <ethread>

Available user pages and symbol/context support vary by dump type. If the chain ends in a kernel lock use windbg-kernel-lock-deadlock-triage; if blocked I/O is supported by IRP evidence use windbg-kernel-irp-lifecycle-triage. Do not promise process heaps or user stacks absent from the dump.

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 117 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 90e7aa94c93a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/win-dev-skills (472 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,066 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-10-08.

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