Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Suspend all threads while stepping
. Selecting the
Suspend All Threads While
Stepping
option can be a productivity win, because the application sus-
pends all the threads while you debug the application. It means the
thread you're currently debugging is the only running thread. No other
thread is affecting resources that may be required; all the energy of the
application is helping you debug the current process. At the very least, no
processing resources that you're not concerned with are being taken up in
the background.
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Avoid the use of method breakpoints
whenever possible
. Method breakpoints are
significantly slower than line number breakpoints and should be avoided
when not required. Setting a line number breakpoint on the first line of
the method is generally adequate if you're tracking method entries. Like-
wise, setting breakpoints on return statements is an equivalent substitute to
tracking method exits.
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Use the classic
VM
for debugging under
JDK
1.3
. Under the
Launching
group
in the
Debugger
dialog of the
IDE
Settings
is the option
Force classic
VM
.
If your project is using
JDK
1.3 or earlier, you'll almost certainly want to
enable this option. In this release of the
JDK
, Sun introduced the Hotspot
JVM
, which significantly increases performance under normal operations
but is a dog under the debugger. Enabling this option launches the
VM
with the
-classic
option, which should run quite a bit faster. This option
isn't available if you're running
JDK
1.4 or greater, because later versions of
the
JDK
don't have this problem. This launching option doesn't apply to
remote debugging sessions.
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Use shared memory
instead of socket access under Windows
. In the
Tr a n s p o r t
group in the
Debugger
dialog of the
IDE
Settings
, you can select your
communication strategy, either
Socket
or
Shared memory
. Selecting the
shared memory option tells
IDEA
to communicate with the debugger via a
shared memory segment rather than via the default option of a local net-
work socket and can provide a modest increase in performance. This
option is available for
IDEA
users on the Windows platform only. Although
this option only applies to local debugging sessions, you can use a similar
option when setting up a Run/Debug configuration and launching your
remote application to communicate via shared memory.
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