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?

Answer 1

reference: social.msdn.microsoft.com

with above ref., I found this solution which is somehow summary of above answers.

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

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

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

4. 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.

5. 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.

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

7. Click "OK".

Also try to delete all the breakpoints(Debug>Delete all the breakpoints),

Answer 2

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 :(.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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).