A method is provided for diagnosing failures in an object-oriented software system. The method comprises collecting runtime diagnostic information; maintaining a record of the diagnostic information in a storage buffer; and dynamically updating the record of the diagnostic information to include a group of the diagnostic information collected over a most recent occurrence of a predetermined interval. The diagnostic information includes at least one set of call stack information for at least one currently running application and at least one set of other information. Each of the at least one set of other information is selected from a set of memory access information, a set of data access information, and a set of paging information for each currently executing process.