What is the impact of the compilation debug attribute in the web.config file?

Question

I have a WCF service written in .NET 4.0 running on Windows 2008 R2 64bit in IIS7.5. What is the impact to the Service of the debug attribute being true?

<compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0"/>

Does it throttle connections? Slow anything down? I've read a bunch of articles (like this one, for instance), but they mostly pertain to .NET 1.1.

Answer 1

It will cause the website to produce (and use) debugging symbols in order to provide meaningful errors that are output when exceptions are thrown. This doesn't throttle anything, but it does create a performance hit especially in very large applications. The largest problem it generates (in my opinion) is the fact that this debugging information is very useful to someone attempting to compromise your system and can create a security problem. On a production/public accessible machine, this setting should be set to false and customErrors should be turned on.