Re: gdb and dlopen

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 01:11:39PM -0700, Kimball Thurston wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
>    In our application, we've got a plugin architecture that, under
> unix, we open using dlopen et al. When trying to debug using gdb, the
> process of calling dlopen seems to take an extraordinary amount of
> time, as it looks like gdb is using ptrace to copy a bunch of the
> debug process's memory at each dlopen into itself. Is there a way to
> delay this behavior, or disable it all together, or fix it? I couldn't
> determine exactly how gdb uses the memory it copies in. All I know is
> it makes using gdb nearly impossible when you have to wait 10 minutes
> for the program to start up...

You might want to look at some of the options under 'set debug' to see
what it's doing.  It's possible that it's just symbol reading
inefficiency biting you; how big are these DSOs?  How many are there?

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer