Controlling Which Symbols TotalView Reads
When debugging large programs with large libraries, reading and parsing symbols can impact performance. This section describes how you can minimize the impact that reading this information has on your debugging session.
NOTE: Using the preference settings and variables described in this section, you can control the time it takes to read in the symbol table. For most programs, even large ones, changing the settings is often inconsequential, but if you are debugging a very large program with large libraries, you can achieve significant performance improvements.
A shared library contains, among other things, loader and debugging symbols. Typically, loader symbols are read quite quickly. Debugging symbols can require considerable processing. The default behavior is to read all symbols. You can change this behavior by telling TotalView to only read in loader symbols or even that it should not read in any symbols.
NOTE: Saying “TotalView reads all symbols” isn’t quite true as TotalView often just reads in loader symbols for some libraries. For example, it only reads in loader symbols if the library resides in the /usr/lib directory. (These libraries are typically those provided with the operating system.) You can override this behavior by adding a library name to the All Symbols list that is described in the next section.
