<a href="http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/httpd/binaries/win32/symbols/"
>nearest mirror site!</a></a></h2>
<h2><a name="symbols">Binary Diagnostic Symbol Downloads</a></h2>
<p>We now distribute a -win32-x86-symbols.zip file containing the precise
debugging symbols corresponding to each released binary distribution.
For the typical user, there is no need to download these archives.</p>
<p>From the primary download and mirrors you can obtain the corresponding
-win32-x86-symbols.zip files for all of the current binary distributions.
To help track down a crash in an older version of Apache HTTP Server,
you will need to refer back to the correspond version from our
<a href="http://archive.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win32/">archive</a>
historical download site.</p>
<p>In order to use these -symbol.zip archives, they must be unzipped (with the
appropriate -dir or 'create directories' flag) into the installed Apache
directory, or debugging tools such as windbg must be configured to search
the directory where these .pdb files are extracted to.</p>
<p>These -symbols.zip packages contain the .pdb diagnostic symbol files (which
correpsond to the distributed binary release) and can be used by nearly all
modern Win32 debugging tools, including the freely available WinDbg utility.
They are most useful for the core developers to review crash dumps generated
by Dr. Watson if Apache experiences a General Protection Fault. They also
provide additional backtrace details in Dr. Watson crash log files, if they
are installed into the Apache directory which is experiencing General
Protection Fault or other crash issues.</p>
<p>It is important to note that the .zip must correspond to the distribution
you are diagnosing, and you must have the correpsonding source tree to
perform any diagostics at the source level. A fully built source tree is
required for all of the 'intermediate' .c and .h source files created during
the build process (see the
<a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/platform/win_compiling.html"
>Apache 2.2 compiling instructions</a>). In order to diagnose bugs,
obtain the sources and symbols archive corresponding to older releases from
our historical
<a href="http://archive.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win32/">archive</a>
of releases.</p>
<p>If you don't understand a word of this, and a developer did not personally
ask you to install them to help troubleshoot a problem, please trust that
you do not need these files to install or run Apache. The .msi runtime
is the only file you need to install, and the -win32-src.zip is the only
file you need to compile your own Apache HTTP Server.</p>