Is Generating Debug Info (pdb) making my application slower in runtime?

Question

In .NET applications is generating debug info (pdb) making my application slower in runtime? or do they only comes into the play when the application crashes?

Answer 1

They only come into play when the program crashes. PDB's just contain information for mapping run-time information to source information that is useful for debugging.

However, building your program in debug mode versus retail mode can make it slower at runtime. This is independent of PDB's - You can generate debug info for retail binaries and use it for debugging. Debug builds typically are less-aggressively optimized in order to make debugging easier.

You should always generate PDB's, even for retail builds. Retail builds are usually what gets deployed, and therefore many problems you'll look at will be from these systems.