debugging mozilla with gdb is so slow

Brian Stell
2001-02-16T21:39:00Z

I find that using gdb to debug Mozilla very slow.

It is so slow that I find many (most?) Linux Mozilla
developers use printfs because they "need to get work done".

My startup time (time to the first moz window) is really
long when I use gdb:

Mozilla no gdb: 11 sec
Mozilla with gdb: 125 sec

This does not seem to meet the goal in the gdb docs:

GDB should be responsive to the user. A programmer
hot on the trail of a nasty bug, and operating under
a looming deadline, is going to be very impatient of
everything, including the response time to debugger
commands.

( http://www.math.psu.edu/doc/emacs/info/gdbint.info-1 )

Gdb itself comes up fairly fast ~ 5-10 sec. This long
start delay makes it basically unusable.

I have a 500MHz P3 Linux Redhat 6.2 system with 512M ram.

Any thoughts?

Brian Stell