Debugger no longer shows locals "busy" VS2022

[dlangBugzillaToGithub]

alphaglosined reported this on 2023-10-08T02:49:13Z

Transfered from https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24180

Description

Created attachment 1892
"Busy" locals window screenshot

I first experienced this around a year ago. At the time I assumed it was to do with shared library support + -betterC, however as time has gone on and more people reported it, it does not appear to be related.

Typically when ending of debugging (regardless of reason), it tends to take a long time as well to finish stopping.

As of this writing, I have gotten around to trying to determine the cause of this problem and have been able to determine it is related to the VisualD plugin. With it disabled it no longer has these issues.

Originally I had 1.3.1 and then updated to the 1.4.0-beta1, as well as updated VS 2022, to latest patch, hoping that it would work.

These problems exhibit for both ldc and dmd for all versions I have tried during this time period.

I've included a screenshot of the "busy" (the busy text isn't there, but everything else matches) locals window.

I have attempted to remove debug info for both CV4 & CV8 to try and see if that affects it. I used the pdbutil from LLVM to dump the pdb file, and compared it against a comparable pdb file produced from clang-cl. However it looks ok. Funky, but nothing explicitly wrong with what it is generating. This aligns with a report that remedybg does show locals ok.

!!!There are attachements in the bugzilla issue that have not been copied over!!!

[Imperatorn]

Any idea how to fix this?

[rainers]

Sorry for the delay.

I occasionally see the "busy" showing up if it takes too long for expressions in watch/auto/locals to evaluate, but it eventually finishes displaying results. I suspect that you run into some expression that never stops evaluating. To figure out what this might be: can you create a mini dump of the "frozen" devenv.exe (using task manager or process explorer)?

[rainers]

Just noticed in a Win11 VM that the issue appears if 'load debug symbols in external process' is enabled in Visual Studio's Debugging options. Please try to disable this.

[TurkeyMan]

Yup, I experienced an issue that might be related, and resolved it by disabling that option as you say.
It's terminally broken without disabling that option. The process locks up and burns through 1GB of ram every 1-2 seconds.
Ending the debug session also caused it for me, and I just had to terminate the process and restart every time.

[rikkimax]

Just saw the updates to the issue.

From what I've heard this issue isn't cropping up on VS2019 only 2022.

[rikkimax]

Mini dump: https://cattermole.co.nz/devenv.dmp

At the time of dump it was at 3gb heap and climbing.

I checked the threads, none of the call stacks screamed stuff was happening. Almost all were sleeping including all of VisualD's.

[rainers]

I stumbled across this the other day and noticed crashes in the debugger extension. Hopefully fixed in https://github.com/dlang/visuald/releases/tag/v1.4.0-rc1