Visual Studio loading symbols

Question

I m working on a ColdFusion project for a while now  and Visual Studio started to behave strange for me at least   I observed that when I started debugging  it built the project  it started the deploy  and the deploy finished and it was starting to load symbols for my project   But it was very slow  and I don t know why it started to do this step  What may I have done   Is this symbol loading step necessary  How can I disable it   In the Tools -  Options -  Debugging -  Symbols dialog there is no Symbol file   pdb  location added  And I pointed in my project s debug directory at the field below  and I checked the  Search the above directory only when symbols are       checkbox  How should I set up this dialog to turn off symbol loading   I looked in the Modules window which symbols are loaded  but it says nothing to me  What is the problem

User · Answer

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

User · Answer

Just encountered this issue  Deleting breakpoints didn t work  or at least not just on its own  After this failed I Went Tools   Options   Debugging   Symbols and  Empty Symbol Cache   and then cleaned the solution and rebuilt   Now seems to be working correctly  So if you try all the other things listed  and it still makes no differnce  these additional bits of info may help

User · Answer

My 2 cents   I was having a similar problem while trying to get a  Visual Studio 2013  Diagnostics Report in x64 Release Mode  CPU Sampling  and while the symbols for the needed dll files were loaded  the symbols for my executable would fail to load    I didn t change anything in the Symbols menu  I instead made some changes within the Property Pages of my executable s thread in the Solution Explorer  namely   Configuration Properties   General   Enable Managed Incremental Build to YES  Configuration Properties   Debugging   Merge Environment to NO  Configuration Properties   C C     Enable Browse Information to YES   FR   Configuration Properties   Linker   Enable Incremental Linking to YES   INCREMENTAL   EDIT   This last one does the trick        Configuration Properties   Linker   Debugging   Generate Debug Info to Yes   DEBUG         After that it worked and it loaded the symbols fine  I m sure one or more of the above did the trick for me  although I m not sure exactly which  and just want to let others know and try this    peace

User · Answer

I had a similar issue where visual studio keeps loading symbol and got stuck    It turns out I added some  Command line arguments  in the Debug options  and one of the parameters is invalid I am supposed to pass in some values     After I remove the extra parameter  it starts working again

User · Answer

For me  it seems related to breakpoints  as indicated in the accepted answer  However  I found two workarounds that did not involve deleting all the breakpoints    Restarting Visual Studio seemed to fix it temporarily  Clicking the  X  button to close Visual Studio while debugging causes the  Do you want to stop debugging   message box to pop up  while this message box is up  the symbols load at ordinary speeds  Once all the symbols are loaded  you can click  No  to cancel the close

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

In my case Visual Studio was looking for 3rd-party PDBs in paths that  on my machine  referenced an optical drive  Without a disc in the tray it took about Windows about  30 to fail  which in turn slowed down Visual Studio as it tried to load the PDBs from that location  More detail is available in my complete answer here  https   stackoverflow com a 17457581 85196

User · Answer

The only thing that worked for me was changing the code type   In the Attach to Process window  I changed the Attach to  selection to Automatically determine the type of code to debug  then my breakpoints were hit   I previously had only Native code selected

User · Answer

Try right clicking at one of the breakpoints  and then choose  Location   Then check the check box  Allow the source code to different from the original version

User · Answer

I had the same problem and even after turning the symbol loading off  the module loading in Visual Studio was terribly slow    The solution was to turn off the antivirus software  in my case NOD32  or better yet  to add exceptions to it so that it ignores the paths from which your process is loading assemblies  in my case it is the GAC folder and the Temporary ASP NET Files folder

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Unchecking  Enable JavaScript debugging for ASP NET  Chrome and IE   in Tools- Options- Debugging- General resolved my case with unavailability to launch VS2017 debugger with pre-set breakpoints

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Visual Studio 2017 Debug symbol  speed-up  options  assuming you haven t gone crazy on option-customization already    At Tools - gt  Options - gt  Debugging - gt  Symbols a  Enable the  Microsoft Symbol Server  option b  Click  Empty Symbol Cache  c  Set your symbol cache to an easy to find spot  like C  dbg symbols or  USERPROFILE  dbg symbols   After re-running Debug  let it load all the symbols once  from start-to-end  or as much as reasonably possible     1A and 2 are the most important steps  1B and 1C are just helpful changes to help you keep track of your symbols    After your app has loaded all the symbols at least once and debugging didn t prematurely terminate  those symbols should be quickly loaded the next time debug runs   I ve noticed that if I cancel a debug-run  I have to reload those symbols  as I m guessing they re  cleaned  up if newly introduced and suddenly cancelled  I understand the core rationale for that kind of flow  but in this case it seems poorly thought out

User · Answer

Another reason for slow loading is if you have disabled  Enable Just My Code  in Debugging options  To enable this go to   Tools - gt  Options - gt  Debugging - gt  General - gt  Enable Just My Code  Managed Only     Make sure this is checked

[visual-studio] Visual Studio loading symbols

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