Correct way to initalize SentrySubsystem?

[ChristianBehrendt]

Hi everyone,

so after deploying a packaged build I noticed, that after a while there were a lot of crashpad_handler.exe's popping up in the task manager attached to our application.

I figured out the reason for this was, that I was using a blueprint to initialize the SentrySubsystem on BeginPlay. I placed this blueprint in my world. So everytime the world would get reloaded a new SentrySubsystem would be initialized and subsequently a new crashpad_handler.exe would be started.

Since I was initalizing it in a blueprint I thought the Subsytem would only be alive as long as the blueprint/level was loaded.
There seems to be no way of checking wether the Subsystem was already initialized, or am I missing something?

So am I correct that in this case my only way of initalizing the Subsystem would be in the Game Instance? I don't want to use the option in the plugin settings, since I want to set the settings programmatically.

Side question - I still don't quite understand how crashpad works with Sentry in Unreal. I'm on Windows, so the plugin is using the Native SDK - so as far as I understand I don't need to further configure crashpad, correct?

Thanks for your time & help!

Best

[tustanivsky]

Hi @ChristianBehrendt,

Yes, SentrySubsystem shares the lifetime of the game instance so placing its initialization logic there sounds reasonable. I like the idea to add a separate method allowing you to check whether Sentry is initialized though, so thanks for the tip!

Note that while working in the UE editor seeing multiple crashpad_handler.exe entries in the task manager after a while is an expected thing. There is no way to de-initialize crashpad and it remains alive until terminating the process by which it was started (UE4Editor.exe in this case). In packaged builds there is no such behavior since the crashpad shuts down when user exits the game.

Regarding the second question - sentry-native which UE plugin uses under the hood on Windows takes care of configuring the crashpad, so you don't have to worry about that.

[ChristianBehrendt]

Hi @tustanivsky,

thank you so much for helping :)

I tried moving the initalization to the GameInstance and indeed it works fine!

What I've noticed regarding Packaged Build behaviour:
When I accidentally initalized the Subsystem over and over via BP the crashpad_handler.exe would pile up after some time in the task manager, which would seem plausible.
However once I moved the Subsystem to the GameInstance there wasn't even a single instance of the crashpad_handler.exe to be seen in the task manager - crashes still came through fine to Sentry though.

Don't know if this has any relevance or not - because initially I would've expected one crashpad_handler.exe to be running constantly, but since it works fine I guess thats not the case?

Best

[tustanivsky]

However once I moved the Subsystem to the GameInstance there wasn't even a single instance of the crashpad_handler.exe to be seen in the task manager - crashes still came through fine to Sentry though.

I'd suggest checking the logs since it doesn't seem to be normal plugin behavior - the crashpad process should be always running along with the game. The message to look for will be something like this:
Sentry initialization completed with result 0/1 (0 on success)