Question

I just recently started looking at dump files to help me analyze crashes of the w3wp process on our production environment at work…

And I would like to know, what are the differences between a minidump and a fulldump file ?

Answer 1

Differences between full memory dump files and mini memory dump files

A memory dump file can collect a variety of information. Typically, a
support engineer must have all the contents of virtual memory to
troubleshoot a problem. In other cases, you might want to capture less
information to focus on a specific problem. The debugger is flexible.
This flexibility lets you limit the information that a memory dump
file captures by collecting either full memory dump files or mini
memory dump files:

• Full memory dump files. These files contain the
  contents of virtual memory for a process. These files are the most
  useful when you are troubleshooting unknown issues. A support engineer
  can use these files to look anywhere in memory to locate any object,
  pull up the variable that was loaded on any call stack, and
  disassemble code to help diagnose the problem. The disadvantage of
  full memory dump files is that they are large. It also may take
  additional time to collect these files, and the process that is being
  recorded must be frozen while the dump file is created.
• Mini memory
  dump files. A mini dump file is more configurable than a full dump
  file and can range from only several megabytes (MB) up to the size of
  a full dump file. The size differs because of the amount of virtual
  memory that the debugger is writing to disk. Although you can gather
  mini memory dump files quickly and they are small, they also have a
  disadvantage. Mini dump files may contain much less information than
  full dump files. The information that a mini dump file gathers may be
  virtually useless to a support engineer if the area of memory that the
  support engineer has to troubleshoot was not captured. For example, if
  the heap memory is not written to the memory dump file, a support
  engineer cannot examine the contents of a message that was being
  processed at the time that the problem occurred. Useful information,
  such as the subject line and the recipient list, would be lost.

An extract from Microsoft’s documentation.