Does VTune support large PDB files from Visual Studio 2005 ?

[tim_meadowcroft]

I'm trying to use VTune (7.2 and now 8.0 for Windows) to analyse a project made up up of a number of DLLs.



When I drill down into results, I can get source code locations for hotspots in the C++ runtime and some of my DLLs, but the key DLL I want to analyse doesn't show source, and leads to the message



"A serious error occurred in file D:VTune5.0analyzersrcSVDPVTSvdp.cpp at line 3623 (Unrecognized architecture for this module. Check if the file uses Intel Architecture, if it does, it may be corrupted. The Source View window will now be closed.). The failed HRESULT that produced this error is 0x80004005. Please contact technical support."



The project is a Intel Win32 project, but this DLL is rather large and the PDB file for the project is 211Mb. Previous VC++ compilers had a size limit of 64Mb on PDB files but VC++ 8 allows larger PDB files - coulD this problem be that VTune doesn't recognise these larger PDB files, and if so, is there an intention to fix this ? For previous VC++ compilers we could compile with "/Zd" (line number info only) to produce a small enough PDB, but Micrsoft have removed this option from VC++ 8, so we have no way to make the PDB file smaller.



I'd contact Premier Support, but the website seems to be down.



Thanks in advance



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Tim

[TimP]

I wouldn't be surprised, with a .pdb that large, that an error could come up of one kind or another. I have never seen that large a .pdb without seeing corruption in part of it, and the error recovery could use improvement. Did you consider trying this session under the x64 OS, to give a little address space?
In order to get to premier site from Windows, you have to be persistent with cookie deletion. For example, with Firefox, set it to delete cookies on exit, close down all firefox sessions, and start Firefox anew to get to premier.

[tim_meadowcroft]

Thanks for that - the large PDB is not corrupted in that Visual Studio 2005 has no problem loading it - previous versions of VS had a hard 64Mb size limit on PDB files, so I'm guessing they've changed or tweaked the file format to remove the size limit... and that this is what's confusing VTune. I'll try a 64 bit OS sometime, but being a large corporation we have "standard machines" and strict data standards, so it's not so easy to get hold of a 64 bit Windows machine at the moment, and I'm more inclined to think that the file wil have a subtly different format rather than us running out of address space.

VTune goes on (after failing to load this) to load a number of other PDB files, but they're all less than 64Mb each.

I can generate MAP files for the DLL and get basic function level info (but no line info), but if there's an internal bug/feature request list, I'd appreciate it if you could raise this issue for perhaps a point release or service pack for better support for VS2005.

On the Premier Website - I've deleted all my IE cookies several times, but still no joy, so I guess I'll have to live with it as things stand

Cheers

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Tim