Re: Debugging a large program

["Nick Savoiu" <savoiu at ics dot uci dot edu>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Jacobowitz" <drow@false.org>
To: "Nick Savoiu" <savoiu@ics.uci.edu>; <gdb@sources.redhat.com>
Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 3:14 PM
Subject: Re: Debugging a large program


> On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 05:15:14PM -0400, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > > BTW, 405MB was for gdb running to main() not just what I said above :)
There
> > > probably are a few global variables but I don't think they should take
up
> > > too much space.
> >
> > That requires loading symbol information for all the shared libraries,
> > which is probably what's taking all the space.  400MB+ is a bit
> > unusual, but I don't know how big your libraries are.
>
> Your libraries contain 288MB of DWARF2 debug information.  We're
> winding up with less than twice that in memory usage for reading in
> partial symbols.  It probably could be reduced somewhat - say, 30%.
> But some of this data we've just got to hold in memory.

I see. If one of the .so files is not actually used, can I somehow prevent
GDB from loading even its partial symbols? How much memory do partial
symbols use?

Thanks,
Nick