Troubleshooting
Most surprises in LocalDocks are the application being deliberately honest about a limit. This page names which is which.
Developer mode shows nothing
Usually correct rather than broken. In order of likelihood:
- Nothing is running. Start a dev server and it should appear within a tick.
- It is running but unclassified. Switch to System mode and look for it. If it is there with an Unclassified chip, the registry has not seen it — that is a gap worth reporting.
- It holds no listening socket. A worker is not a service. Look in Processes.
A process is missing entirely
LocalDocks never elevates, so it can only see processes your own Windows account owns. If a service runs as SYSTEM, as another user, or inside a container, it will not appear — and the socket it holds will appear in Ports without an attributable owner.
A telemetry card says it is unavailable
That is the card working as intended: it is reporting that the machine did not provide the measurement, rather than printing a zero you would have believed. The card names the reason.
- CPU on the first tick — a rate needs two samples. It resolves after one interval.
- GPU — needs Windows 10 1709 or later and a WDDM 2.0 driver. Virtual machines and older drivers expose no counters.
- Thermal zones — hardware dependent. Many machines expose none, and a zone that exists may report no temperature.
- A single rate inside a present card — usually the first sample for a newly appeared interface or drive.
See System telemetry for what each card measures.
The detail panel says denied or unavailable
- Denied — Windows refused to open the process for that field. Expected for anything LocalDocks cannot fully access without elevation.
- Working directory — always unavailable in V1. Reading it needs a walk of the process environment block, which is not implemented.
Terminate was refused
| Result | What happened |
|---|---|
| Stale | The PID no longer has the creation time the row recorded. Windows recycled it, and the action was refused so a different process could not be killed by mistake. Close the panel and look again. |
| Denied | Windows refused the operation for this process. |
| Failed | Something else went wrong; the message names it. |
“Scan failing — showing last good snapshot”
A sampler tick failed. LocalDocks keeps the last good snapshot on screen behind the warning rather than blanking a working interface over one bad tick. The status bar carries the detail. If it persists, the log file below is the next place to look.
The window is blank on launch
Almost always a WebView2 problem. WebView2 is preinstalled on Windows 11 and current Windows 10; if it is missing or damaged, install the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime and launch again.
SmartScreen blocks the installer
The installer is not yet code-signed, so Windows warns that the publisher is unrecognised. Verify the SHA-256 against the release page before continuing — see Installation.
The log file
Warnings and errors are written to a single rotating file, capped at 512 KB:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\com.silentminds.localdocks\logsIt can contain executable names, PIDs, port numbers and Windows error text. It does not contain command lines, file paths or working directories. Nothing is transmitted anywhere — there is no crash reporter and no network client.
Reporting a problem
Open an issue on the repository. For a misclassified service, include the classification reason from the detail panel and the process name — that is the pair that identifies which rule is wrong.