GDB Load Symbols & Wishes

[Vladimir Prus]

On Thursday 03 April 2008 21:28:13 Clarke, Jason, RBSGC wrote:
> I'm basing all my comments on what I observe GDB to be doing in my top. 
> There are 2 major CPU hits one seems to be when there is the iteration
> over the threads (I can see them refreshing one by one in my gui) and
> then second seems to be the the loading of the locals window. In terms
> of the threads, the app I'm using has about 15 of them.
> 
> By far the worst is the locals window, it maxes out a cpu for a few
> seconds, so my comments where aimed at trying to lessen the hit for such
> a step. So only deep query an object if explicitly required. As you can
> guess waiting a couple of seconds for a step in a debugger can get old
> quite quickly.

It's still hard to optimize not knowing which commands/operations
are actually slow. Can you:

1. Get yourself GDB 6.8
2. Assuming it works fine, run to the code where stepping is slow.
3. In the GDB window, enter the following command:

	-enable-timings yes

4. Step a couple of times.
5. In GDB window, right click and select "Show internal commands".
6. Copy-paste the commands and send me.

I suspect that the output will reveal that GDB command themself don't
take very much time, but that will suggest where else to look :-)

- Volodya