Re: Caching of object/libraries/files

[Nick Savoiu <savoiu at ics dot uci dot edu>]

The problem that I have is that after I run gdb once, exit it then start it 
right after it seems to reload all the debug info from disk. I was expecting 
a good deal of them to be loaded from the OS file cache -> much less disk 
activity the second time around.

Nick

> On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 10:46:47AM -0800, Nick Savoiu wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I have a rather large project composed of a small driver executable and
> > quite a few .so libraries that it uses.
> > 
> > When I invoke it with GDB, upon executing 'run' it takes quite a while for
> > GDB to do it's thing (i.e. load symbols, whatever else it does) 
particularly
> > since it does a lot of disk access.
> > 
> > I was thinking that, if I start a GDB session on this project, run it for 
a
> > while then quit and immediately restart a similar session, then most of 
the
> > files would be cached. However, I see the same amount of disk access for 
the
> > second session when 'run' is invoked as for the first.
> > 
> > Any ideas why this is so? The GDB session itself uses about 340MB and I 
have
> > 1GB RAM.
> 
> This is something that I've been meaning to fix for a long, long time. 
> We unload all shared objects when the program exits; what we ought to
> do is move them to a separate cache structure.