Fault Tolerant Heap

Windows 7 has a new service called the Fault Tolerant Heap (FTH). It detects when an application gets buggy. It then surrounds the process memory space with a buffer. This buffer can prevent the app from crashing when it writes to memory that is out of bounds.

The way FTH works is that it monitors the Windows Event Log. It will load the FTH client in with the app it detects as having problems. Note that this will have a small adverse affect on the performance of the app. The app will also be consuming more memory due to the overhead.

The FTH is not an end all to heap corruption. It cannot solve all heap issues in programs. But it is a good start.