gdb performance is impossible!!

[Michael Snyder]

Jake Colman wrote:

>     JB> What operation, specifically, is slow?
> 
> Everything!  Startup is excruiatingly slow.  After that, it can take over 30
> seconds for it to acknowledge breakpoint settings commands.  Displaying of
> variables is sloooow.  Nothing at all is reasonably responsive.  I should
> tell you that my system is a reasonably configured SPARC Ultra 10.

Well, this sounds like swapping behavior.  I suspect that 
the symbol table has simply grown too large to reside entirely
in memory.  I predict that if you add more memory you will 
immediately see a factor of N improvement where N is an
integer greater than ten.