Setting Up Remote Debugging Sessions

About Remote Debugging

Debugging a remote process with TotalView is similar to debugging a native process, with these primary differences:

The remote server hosting the processes to debug must be running the TotalView Server process tvdsvr, automatically launched by TotalView in most cases.

TotalView performance depends on your network’s performance. If the network is overloaded, debugging can be slow.

You cannot debug remote processes using TotalView Individual.

TotalView can automatically launch tvdsvr either:

Independently on each remote host, called single-process server launch.

As a bulk job, launching all remote processes at the same time, called bulk server launch.

Because TotalView can automatically launch tvdsvr, programs that launch remote processes rarely require any special handling. When using TotalView, it doesn’t matter whether a process is local or remote.

When debugging programs remotely, the architecture of the remote machine must be compatible with that of the machine running TotalView. See “Platform Issues when Remote Debugging” for more information.

This chapter explains how to set up TotalView remote debugging sessions, detailed in the following sections:

“Automatically Launching a Process on a Remote Server”.

In most cases, you can easily perform this from the New Program dialog which launches the TotalView Server tvdsvr program automatically. If so, you will likely not need to read any of the following sections.

“Troubleshooting Server Autolaunch”

Some systems have requirements that may prohibit Totalview’s default autolaunching capabilities. This section discusses various ways to customize autolaunch options and commands.

“Starting the TotalView Server Manually”

You can also just manually launch the tvdsvr program, discussed in this section.

“TotalView Server Launch Options and Commands”

The File > Preferences dialog box features several ways to cusotmize both options and commands for single and bulk server launch. This section discusses these options as well as specific commands relevant to particular platforms.

“Debugging Over a Serial Line”

TotalView supports debugging programs over a serial line as well as TCP/IP sockets, discussed in this section.