Menu
I'm trying to determine whether there are any downsides to building release binaries with debug symbols left in. For our release builds, we compile with -O3 at the moment and if there are any crashes, the cores are next to useless.
So, what I would like to do is modify the build to leave in debug symbols, i.e. -O3 -g, but there is resistance to this as the feeling is that there could be some impact (aside from size of binary). I know that the size issue can be fixed by stripping out the symbols, but is there anything else subtle that I'm missing?
774
Load time will be increased when the debug symbols are present over when not present. The on-disk footprint will be larger. If you compiled with zero optimization then you really lose nothing. If you set optimization, then the optimized code will be less optimized because of the debug symbols.
A debug build of your code will add a lot (potentially) of extra debug information and mostly disables any optimizations. As such a debug build is always larger and slower than a release build. Debug builds should only be used for development.
To remove debugging symbols from a binary (which must be an a. out or ELF binary), run strip --strip-debug filename. Wildcards can be used to treat multiple files (use something like strip --strip-debug $LFS/tools/bin/*).
The inclusion of . PDB files in a web application's deployment is safe and doesn't include the risks associated with publishing a Debug build.
Separate symbols from binary.
g++ -ggdb -o target obj1.o obj2.o ...
strip target --only-keep-debug -o target.dbg
strip target
Then in gdb, use symbol-file target.dbg
EDIT: On the actual question:
The downsides are:
Execution speed is not affected - Debug symbols are simply added to the binary in a separate section, they may affect your virtual address space size but nothing else.
64
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
