From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Daniel Jacobowitz To: gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [RFA] bug in symtab.c:lookup_block_symbol()'s search method Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 10:59:00 -0000 Message-id: <20010914140051.A20039@nevyn.them.org> References: <20010909074800.A8112@shell17.ba.best.com> <3B9D054A.4C3CC2B1@cygnus.com> <20010910113226.A23487@shell17.ba.best.com> <87zo82swwa.fsf@cgsoftware.com> <20010910130347.A5628@shell17.ba.best.com> <8766aq7nki.fsf@cgsoftware.com> <3BA219EF.3000300@cygnus.com> <9003-Fri14Sep2001190223+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> <20010914091241.A28921@shell17.ba.best.com> <1659-Fri14Sep2001204927+0300-eliz@is.elta.co.il> X-SW-Source: 2001-09/msg00186.html On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 08:49:28PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 09:12:41 -0700 > > From: Jason Molenda > > > > > I agree with Dan here: I don't think this specific issue can be a > > > valid reason for saying that GDB is ``broken'' and that ``gdb 5.1 can > > > not be released'' in its current shape. > > > > Unfortunately, this performance issue becomes "breakage" on some > > platforms. > > Even if the performance hit is significant, I fail to understand how > can someone say the entire program is broken, or that it cannot be > released. Can we please get things back into their proportion? This much I can mostly agree with, but... > Anyway, I don't consider 5-10 seconds such a long time. We still have > in GDB operations that take much more, and we don't consider it > ``broken'' because of that. Maybe you don't. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to start eliminating them. I'm guessing that Jason is another. A lot of operations take frustratingly long that shouldn't. For instance, Jason is probably testing on a machine capable of displaying a GUI IDE and running MacOS X. That means a PowerPC, presumably, and at least in the 300MHz-500MHz range. I do much of my native GDB testing on a 50MHz MIPS R5432 board, which is probably on the order of thirty or forty times slower. His ten second delays become my five minute coffee breaks. I'm not exagerating; hitting tab accidentally while typing locks gdb solid for five minutes. I intend to do some work on fixing that. If he has a patch which can remove one such delay, I'm vastly in favor of it. > > If you're using GDB in under an IDE and you have a Locals window > > open, and one of those locals is an opaque structure, whenever you > > step into our out of that frame, you'll have this 5-10 second delay. > > So display the hourglass for 10 seconds and be done with that. No one > will really notice, except you and me. The world is full with good > software that sometimes has 10-sec delays, to say nothing of bad > software. Not if every Step instruction takes ten seconds! That makes debugging practically infeasible. -- Daniel Jacobowitz Carnegie Mellon University MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer