Speeding up load times for windbg?

WINDBG
1

Is there a way to force windbg to not load any symbols when I attach
to a process? I’ve turned off the “resolve unqualified symbols”
option and it is still pretty slow. I am using the microsoft symbol
server, but I thought it would only be slow the first time the
application is run (since it has to download the correct symbols). It
seems to be slow every time the application is run though. Any
suggestions on how to make windbg super fast would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
J

2

Your best bet is to take the MS symbol server out of your path. You’re
probably still taking the hit of the round trip to the symbol server to look
for things that aren’t available (third party DLLs, your DLLs, versions of
MS DLLs that aren’t on the server, etc). You can test this by removing the
symbol server from your path and seeing if attaching to the process speeds
up greatly (you can leave the downstream store in your path so that you pick
up the symbols that you’ve downloaded).

If you can identify which symbols are causing you pain, you can also create
an exclusion list that will prevent the symbol engine from looking on the
symbol server for those PDBs. It would be initially annoying to get the list
together, but once you do you wouldn’t need to muck with your path all of
the time. See the “Exclusions” section of the “symhttp.doc” file installed
along with WinDBG for details.

-scott

–
Scott Noone
Consulting Associate
OSR Open Systems Resources, Inc.
http://www.osronline.com

“Jonathon” wrote in message news:xxxxx@windbg…
> Is there a way to force windbg to not load any symbols when I attach
> to a process? I’ve turned off the “resolve unqualified symbols”
> option and it is still pretty slow. I am using the microsoft symbol
> server, but I thought it would only be slow the first time the
> application is run (since it has to download the correct symbols). It
> seems to be slow every time the application is run though. Any
> suggestions on how to make windbg super fast would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> J
>

3

Perhaps you have an unqualified bu breakpoint stored in your debugger workspace settings; try deleting them? HKCU\Software\Microsoft\WinDbg iirc.

  • S

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathon
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 8:34
To: Kernel Debugging Interest List
Subject: [windbg] Speeding up load times for windbg?

Is there a way to force windbg to not load any symbols when I attach
to a process? I’ve turned off the “resolve unqualified symbols”
option and it is still pretty slow. I am using the microsoft symbol
server, but I thought it would only be slow the first time the
application is run (since it has to download the correct symbols). It
seems to be slow every time the application is run though. Any
suggestions on how to make windbg super fast would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
J

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