Debugging – what are the negative consequences of shutting down the debug heap? (_NO_DEBUG_HEAP == 1)

The initial stage of my program loads a large amount of data into the STL container I found it would take a few minutes to reach the true meaning of my program

After searching, I found that I can set it in my vs2012 configuration properties – > debugging – > environment variables_ NO_ DEBUG_ Heap = = 1... Turn off windows debug heap utilization This increases my debugging speed by 10 times I haven't found any description of what debugging functions I lost in doing so

Summary: what checks were completed and what debug information was generated using the windows debug heap?

thank you.

Solution

Debug heap affects performance in two ways:

First, it adds heap integrity checks during heap operations I didn't find details about these checks, but suppose it involves verifying the integrity of the data structure used to manage the heap every time it is allocated or free

Second, it disables the low fragmentation heap (LFH) option In the release version, LFH is obtained by default In a debug version, you won't – unless you use_ NO_ DEBUG_ HEAP. This is not necessarily a speed penalty, but it may be

There is a clue in the document of heapsetinformation

Note that the C and C runtime libraries provide memory management based on the system heap API, and they also have debug and non debug modes that can affect performance For the function of debugging CRT, there is more detailed documentation You can check and see if turning off CRT debugging is sufficient to significantly improve performance without affecting process heap debugging mode