On Saturday, I finally completed the new symbol table code.
Last week, I already noticed a really huge performance leak, so I spent some more time investigating. Unfortunately, I'm getting more and more confused the more I play with this.
At the moment, I feel like I'm seeing ghosts .....
Running the complete debugger test suite in the old debugger takes about 65-70 seconds. In the new debugger code, it takes about 150-160 seconds. So that's more than twice the time and we must have a really huge performance leak somewhere.
So I started investigating. To make sure it's not the new symbol table code in the runtime, I wrote a small script which compiles Mono.C5 100 times and uses mono --debug each time when invoking gmcs.
I was really surprised when I looked at the results:
It took 24 minutes 57.195 seconds with the old code and 24 minutes 34.012 seconds with the new one - which means we're now 23.183 seconds (or 1.55%) faster than before !
This means the real problem must be somewhere inside the debugger ....