Logo Questions Linux Laravel Mysql Ubuntu Git Menu
 

Visual Studio loading symbols

People also ask

How do I stop Visual Studio from loading symbols?

You can't do this in a very fine grained fashion but you can disable automatic symbol loading and then manually choose the symbols to load via the Modules window (Debug -> Windows -> Modules). Show activity on this post. Show activity on this post.

What is loading symbols in Visual Studio?

Visual Studio offers two modes of automatic symbol loading: **Automatically load symbols for all modules unless excluded: **As the title indicates, unless you add a module to the exclude list by clicking “Specify excluded modules”, Visual Studio will try to load symbols for all modules in the process.

How do I load Debug symbols?

On the Tools > Options > Debugging > Symbols page, you can: Specify and select search paths for symbol files. Specify symbol servers for Microsoft, Windows, or third-party components. Specify modules that you do or don't want the debugger to automatically load symbols for.

How do I add Debug symbols in Visual Studio?

From Visual Studio, select Tools > Options > Debugging. Select Symbols from the list, and then select the + sign to add a new Azure DevOps symbol server location.


Debug -> Delete All Breakpoints ( http://darrinbishop.com/blog/2010/06/sharepoint-2010-hangs-after-visual-studio-2010-f5-debugging ) After that you can use them again, but do it once. It will remove some kind of "invalid" breakpoints too and then loading symbols will be fast again. I was chasing this issue for days :(.


Another reason for slow loading is if you have disabled "Enable Just My Code" in Debugging options. To enable this go to:

Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> General -> Enable Just My Code (Managed Only) 

Make sure this is checked.


Configure in Tools, Options, Debugging, Symbols.

You can watch the output window (view, output) to see what it's doing usually. If it's really slow that probably means it's hitting a symbol server, probably Microsoft's, to download missing symbols. This takes three HTTP hits for each file it can't find on every startup - you can sometimes see this in the status bar at the bottom or in e.g. Fiddler. You can see which modules have loaded symbols in Debug, Windows, Modules whilst you're debugging.

Symbols mean you get useful stack trace information into third party and system assemblies. You definitely need them for your own code, but I think those get loaded regardless. Your best bet is to turn off any non-local symbol sources in that menu and, if you're loading lots of symbols for system assemblies that you don't need to debug into you can temporarily disable loading those to speed up debug start - but they're often useful to have loaded.


Just had this problem.

I fixed it by navigating to:

Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols

Then unchecking all non-local sources for Symbol file (.pdb) locations

e.g. Microsoft Symbol Servers and msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols


I faced a similar problem. In my case I had set _NT_SYMBOL_PATH to download from Microsoft Servers for use in WinDbg and it looks like when set, Visual Studio will use that with no way to ignore it. Removing that environment variable resolved my issue.


You can try the following answer to Visual Studio debugging/loading very slow:

  1. Go to Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> General

  2. CHECK the checkmark next to "Enable Just My Code".

  3. Go to Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols

  4. Click on the "..." button and create/select a new folder somewhere on your local computer to store cached symbols. I named mine "Symbol caching" and put it in Documents -> Visual Studio 2012.

  5. Click on "Load all symbols" and wait for the symbols to be downloaded from Microsoft's servers, which may take a while. Note that Load all symbols button is only available while debugging.

  6. UNCHECK the checkmark next to "Microsoft Symbol Servers" to prevent Visual Studio from remotely querying the Microsoft servers.

  7. Click "OK".

Also try to delete all the breakpoints(Debug>Delete all the breakpoints),

See Also: Visual Studio 2015 RC1 Hangs in Debug mode while loading symbols