Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!alice!mjh
From: mjh@alice.att.com (Mike Haertel)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: -g libs on System V
Keywords: System V, Motif
Message-ID: <20440@alice.att.com>
Date: 22 Jun 91 16:54:29 GMT
References: <10570@aspect.UUCP>
Reply-To: mjh@research.att.com (Mike Haertel)
Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs
Lines: 23

In article <10570@aspect.UUCP> bobj@aspect.UUCP (Bob Joyce) writes:
>	(2) Starting up the executable on the MPC under gdb took about 
>	    20 minutes!.  Reason - the process consumed more than
>	    40 Megabytes of memory, thereby causing intense swapping.
>	    On the sparc, gdb started up in less than a minute and consumed
>	    only about 6 Megs.  The same problem occurs with sdb and on
>	    another System V, Motorola platform.
>
>Is this problem common to System V architectures?  Is it particular to 
>Motorola?  Have other Motif developers experienced high memory consumption
>when they compile with "-g"?   Do developers have to be very selective
>about their use of "-g"?

This is not a property of System V, but rather a property of gdb.

On machines that use Berkeley (dbx) style symbols for -g, gdb uses
a lazy scheme to only partially read in symbol tables, until they
are actually needed.  (Randy Smith implemented this.)

Nobody has made this work with System V (COFF) symbol tables yet.
I imagine it can probably be done.

sdb presumably does not use lazy loading of symbols.