Debug Speed?

[lpcware]

Content originally posted in LPCWare by Mark_O on Fri Jun 25 01:48:05 MST 2010
We're using the LPCXpresso/Red Suite with the RDB1768v2 development kit to evaluate the development environment. We've noticed that single-stepping in the debugger is quite slow, even though it was improved in one of the recent releases (it used to be much worse).

Currently it still takes about 1 second to step a single instruction, on fairly fast dev. systems. This is significantly slower than the other debug environments we have experience with, including those based on Eclipse.

Questions are:

1) why is this as slow as it is?
2) can/will the speed be improved in the future?
3) is there anything we can do to optimize this in our configuration settings?
4) would alternate hardware debug interfaces offer better speed?  (e.g the Red Probe, or LPCLink)

Thanks.

- Mark

[lpcware]

Content originally posted in LPCWare by Mark_O on Fri Jun 25 14:25:02 MST 2010
Thanks for the quick and informative response.

- Mark

[lpcware]

Content originally posted in LPCWare by CodeRedSupport on Fri Jun 25 02:25:45 MST 2010
Things that affect the single stepping speed include:
- the number of peripherals you have displayed
- the number of memory views you have open
- (to a lesser extent) the number of local/globals shown in the  variables and expression windows

After every step, all of this information has to be re-fetched from the  target (as well as the core registers).

You will definitely see an improvement by using Red Probe, which uses a  dedicated chip to handle the debug interface, whereas for LPC-Link (and  RDB1768v2), this is done in software on the host.