Decrease time to attach & load symbols

Question

Generally speaking, what are your recommendations on this? Currently takes close to 10 minutes for me to attach to a locally running IIS process hosting SharePoint 2007.

Answer 1

Make sure your symbol path includes a local cache directory so that it doesn't download symbols from Microsoft's public symbol server every time you attach.

Also, I haven't tried this with Visual Studio, but you may also be able to set up an exclusion list identifying modules for which you don't have symbols.

Answer 2

In Visual Studio 2010 I decreased my attach to w3wp process time to almost instant by going to Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols, selecting Only specified modules and clicking OK. This makes Visual Studio load the symbols for the six assemblies our team wrote and skips loading symbols for the other 146 modules in the process.

Note, I have Microsoft Symbol Servers checked for my Symbol file (.pdb) locations and I have my symbols caching to c:\debugSymbols.