In Windows 8's Task Manager under the "Details" tab there is a detailed list of every running process in the system.
In the context menu of every process, there is a new menu item called "Analyze wait chain":
What is this wait chain and what does this analysis do?
Best Answer
This is a special tool to deal with hung and frozen programs. It helps you identify the actual process that caused the freeze:
So if you have an unresponsive process, this tool will show you a resource dependency tree and it will highlight the frozen child processes (if any) with red color. By ending the correct ones you might still save your data in the parent process.
See this or this blog posts for a detailed description.
As to the wait chain, see the official API documentation:
In fact, the Wait Chain Traversal API has been around since Windows Vista. For example, Windows 7's Resource Monitor has already had the same context menu item:
So in Windows 8 it was merely moved to a more convenient location in the Task Manager (copied, to be exact, as Resource Monitor still has it too).