CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windbg
Benj
Benj

Reputation: 32418

Does WinDBG purge cached pdb files after a while?

I use WinDBG a fair bit to debug dumps that testers send me. Right now, I'm experiencing very poor performance with obtaining debugging symbols from Microsoft's symbol server. I'm not the only one so I expect Microsoft are having server issues at the moment but it's highlighted something about WinDBG's symbol caching which I haven't paid much attention to before.

Very often when I open a new dump it's trying to download every pdb for all the Microsoft symbols. It caches them for the duration of my debugging session, and if I close WinDBG and open it again it often opens without having to download symbols. However if I open a dump that I was using a few days earlier it seems to have often lost the symbols that it downloaded previously. It seems to be purging old pdb files or some such..

I have my symbol path set up like this:

SRV*C:\SymCache*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

So, question, is it possible to control how often WinDBG purges cached symbols? I'd be quite happy for it to fill a few GB with symbol files since disk is cheap...

Upvotes: 1

Views: 900

Answers (1)

Thomas Weller
Thomas Weller

Reputation: 59564

No, symbols are not purged. I am not aware of any information that would tell WinDbg the age of symbols except the timestamp which is not reliable. The file pingme.txt is an empty file.

As mentioned by @blabb in the comments, purging would be counter-productive, given that you can download symbol packages (Microsoft) for offline use for very old symbols, e.g. Windows XP.

On my PC which I got when I joined the company, the symbols of 2014 are still there:

Symbols of 2014

Upvotes: 2

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