Simon Willison’s Weblog

How to look at the stack with gdb. Useful short tutorial on gdb from first principles.

# 24th May 2021, 6:23 pm / c, debugger, julia-evans

How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (via) Incredible debugging war story: t0st was fed up of waiting six minutes (!) for GTA Online to load on their PC, so they used a host of devious debugging tricks to try and figure out what was going on. It turned out the game was loading a 10MB JSON file detailing all of the available in-game purchases, but inefficient JSON parsing meant it was pegging an entire CPU for 4 minutes mainly running the strlen() C function. Despite not having access to source code or debugging symbols t0st figured out the problem and managed to inject a custom DLL that hooked some internal functions and dropped load times down from 6m down to to 1m50s!

# 1st March 2021, 7:12 pm / debugger, hacking, profiling

Debugging in Python. The missing manual for Python’s powerful pdb debugger.

# 18th November 2009, 12:34 pm / debugger, debugging, pdb, python

pudb. A full-screen, curses console based visual debugger for Python, built using the urwid console UI library.

# 1st November 2009, 12:09 pm / console, debugger, pdb, pudb, python, ui, urwid

DebugBar. Suggested at BarCamp London 3 as a useful tool for developing with IE; apparently includes a great JavaScript debugger.

# 25th November 2007, 10:32 am / barcamplondon3, debugbar, debugger, debugging, ie, internet-explorer, javascript