gdb and dlopen

[Kimball Thurston <kimball at sgrail dot com>]

Hey all,

   In our application, we've got a plugin architecture that, under
unix, we open using dlopen et al. When trying to debug using gdb, the
process of calling dlopen seems to take an extraordinary amount of
time, as it looks like gdb is using ptrace to copy a bunch of the
debug process's memory at each dlopen into itself. Is there a way to
delay this behavior, or disable it all together, or fix it? I couldn't
determine exactly how gdb uses the memory it copies in. All I know is
it makes using gdb nearly impossible when you have to wait 10 minutes
for the program to start up...

thanks,

Kimball