Slow handling of C++ symbol names

[Will Cohen]

Michael Snyder wrote:
> Will Cohen wrote:
> 
>> When debugging some C++ program with gdb (both versions 5.3 and 6.0) 
>> it takes a long time to load the debugging information and get a 
>> command-line prompt. The particular example that demonstrates this 
>> problem is monotone (http://www.venge.net/monotone/) which makes use 
>> of the boost libraries (http://www.boost.org/). gdb loading monotone 
>> with the associated debugging information takes over 30 seconds to get 
>> the initial command-line prompt on a 1.7GHz Athlon with 512MB or DRAM. 
> 
> 
> 30 seconds!  Why, you young whipper-snapper... I remember when you
> used to have to go get a cup of coffee while gdb loaded symbols!   ;-)
> Hell, sometimes you could go out and *buy* the coffee...

In the early 90's I did a port of GCC to the Gould NP1, a dual processor 
  machine (18MHz ECL multiboard processors) with a staggering 256MB of 
RAM at Purdue University. Unfortunately, the machine was the main 
machine for ALL the undergraduates. During the afternoons it was typical 
to see gcc 1.40 take 3 hours to build when there were 70 or more people 
on the machine.

The process for gdb debugging monotone wouldn't fit in the NP1's 256MB 
of memory. According to top SIZE is 265MB and RSS is 262MB.  So maybe 30 
seconds for filling up a quarter gigabyte of memory isn't so bad.

-Will