Huge slowdown since 6.0

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 12:01:44PM -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> Hmm, begs a few questions:
> 
> - why do we load the symbols during startup?
> Load globals on demand?

What sort of demand do you have in mind?

> - why do we sort the symbols during startup?
> Use a hash (so that break main is fast) and sort when (break main<tab> 
> is entered?)

Partial symbols are the only remaining thing that gets sorted.  Fixing
this is somewhat complicated; it was the first option I looked at.  My
preferred first step is to not keep any symbol address information in
partial symbols, after which I think it will be easier; this is a
long-term cleanup.

> - why don't we do more while GDB is twiddling its thumbs in the event 
> loop event loop?

Hmm.... that's pretty complicated to implement.  It would require doing
things in small chunks and handling interruption gracefully.  The
problem is, at the first symbol lookup, we will probably need to have
all the symbols...

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer