Debugging is really slow

GrandFather has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm using PerlIDE on Windows and have noticed that if I set a breakpoint execution slows down by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Apart from not setting breakpoints, is there any workaround for this? Is it a function of using PerlIDE, or is it more likely a debugger issue?

Perl is Huffman encoded by design.

Comment on Debugging is really slow

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Re: Debugging is really slow by tphyahoo (Vicar) on Jun 13, 2005 at 08:15 UTC
How about posting a simple example where this happens? You could also try the simple example using the perl command line debugger and see if it slows down the same way. If perl -d doesn't have the same slowdown, it's probably the ide. My limited experience with the command line debugger is that it's maybe a little bit slower, but not 10 times slower (an order or magnitude). But, that's just my limited experience.	[reply]
Re^2: Debugging is really slow by itub (Priest) on Jun 13, 2005 at 14:37 UTC
I haven't measured with any accuracy, but perl -d feels about 10 times slower to me.	[reply]
Re^2: Debugging is really slow by GrandFather (Saint) on Jun 13, 2005 at 20:49 UTC
Hmm, tricky. I could post some execution times. But I doubt that the exact ratio "debug with a breakpoint set" / "debug without a breakpoint set" actually adds much information. What is of interest is that the breakpoint isn't being hit. It's not a conditional breakpoint inside a loop for example. In the immediate case it is a breakpoint set to let me inspect variables after a lot of work has been done (parsing a 1 Mb file with HTML::TreeBuilder). Perl is Huffman encoded by design.	[reply]
Re: Debugging is really slow by Popcorn Dave (Abbot) on Jun 13, 2005 at 17:11 UTC
From my experience using Ptkdb, I notice things slow down a bit when I'm doing a line by line trace and I step over a module call, but nothing along the lines of what you're speaking of. Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.	[reply]