Re: Discussing the next GDB release (GDB 7.0?)

[Paul Pluzhnikov <ppluzhnikov@google.com>]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 7:46 PM, Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com> wrote:
>> Anything else that you'd like to be put on the list for
>> this release?
>
> Tom suggested PR/9711: Quadratic slowdown in backtrace command.
> I added to the list because it is a regression compared to 6.8,
> but the example given shows the heavy slowdown only with a very
> large number of frames. I wonder if this can happen with a more
> typical number of frames - I suspect that Paul (the submitter)
> probably hit the problem in a real situation before coming up
> with this reduced example...

Correct.

It happened while debugging gdb+python on archer branch,
which I accidentally put into an infinite recursion.

This had quite a large number of frames, *and* there were more
parameters in each frame, so it took longer. IIRC, it took
about 15 minutes to get to the top of the stack, where the
"interesting" frames were.

I don't believe putting a program into infinite recursion is
very unusual; I've done it many times in the past :-(

And when that does happen, waiting minutes for GDB to unwind
stack is the last thing you want to do.

-- 
Paul Pluzhnikov