very very slow symbol searches

[David Carlton]

On 22 Jan 2003 04:00:16 -0800, "Martin M. Hunt" <hunt@redhat.com> said:

> Insight calls search_symbols twice on startup.  Sometime 2-4 weeks ago,
> (builds from CVS on sources) Insight started taking a minute or two to
> load when debugging itself.  It is very fast when debugging small
> programs, but large things like insight or gdb take forever.  At first
> glance the problem is that search_symbols() is taking 20-30 seconds to
> return.

Could you give some commands to reproduce this problem?  (Preferably
using GDB to debug itself.)  I tried running GDB on itself and then
typing 'info functions', and I don't see any significant time
difference on current mainline GDB versus GDB 5.2 or 5.3.  (In both
cases, the version of GDB being debugged current mainline GDB.)  I
also tried running to main first, to pull in dynamic libraries (which
shouldn't have debug info on my system, I think).  Without running to
main, mainline GDB was actually the fastest, albeit only slightly so;
with running to main, mainline GDB was slightly slower than 5.3 but
dramatically faster than 5.2.

But search_symbols is kind of weird (e.g. in its efforts to get info
from minimal symbols if there isn't enough debug info), so I could
easily believe that I'm not managing to tickle the bug that you're
seeing.  Could you give more details about what you're doing?

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu