VSPerf VS2010 and other profiling tools not picking up pdb

Question

trying to profile with VSPerfCmd (VS2010 profiler), and also with Intel VTune Amplifier XE 2013: some results are available, for VsPerfCmd in .vsp file. However, profier is not picking up pdb. no code is available for some parts of the application.

Did this happened to you already, and do you know if some compiler options should be turned on so as to get complete profile?

in which directory does profiler go to find .pdb info ?

thanks

Answer 1

The profilers and debuggers on Windows by default look up the PDB files by the path written in the executable. So the first thing to do is to open the executable in some hex editor and search for ".pdb" string and check whether file mentioned there exists on disk. If that is not the case, check that you specify /Zi or /ZI option to the compiler and /debug option to the linker.

If symbolic names are missing for SOME parts of the application, check whether those parts are separate dynamic or static libraries and whether you generate debug information for those. In case of static libraries it's easy to get the debug information lost along the linking way since by default /Zi flag embeds the debug information into the vc*.pdb file (e.g. vc90.pdb for VS 2008) and that file is usually not exported into SDK by build systems. For static libraries I personally find the most instrumental to use /Z7 option for debug information since that embeds it into the object files themselves and then to the *.lib file and then it propagates to the final *.exe / *.dll binary's PDB file.