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When should I include PDB files for a production release? Should I use the "Optimize code" flag and how would that affect the information I get from an exception?

If there is a noticable performance benefit I would want to use the optimizations but if not I'd rather have accurate debugging info. What is typically done for a production app?

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See comparison of options in blog.vuscode.com/malovicn/archive/2007/08/05/… –  Michael Freidgeim Apr 24 '13 at 21:35
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3 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

When you want to see source filenames and line numbers in your stacktraces, generate PDBs using the pdb-only option. Optimization is separate from PDB generation, i.e. you can optimize and generate PDBs without a performance hit.

From the C# Language Reference


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To answer your first question, you only need to include PDBs for a production release if you need line numbers for your exception reports.

To answer your second question, using the "Optimise" flag with PDBs means that any stack "collapse" will be reflected in the stack trace. I'm not sure whether the actual line number reported can be wrong - this needs more investigation.

To answer your third question, you can have the best of both worlds with a rather neat trick. The major differences between the default debug build and default release build are that when doing a default release build, optimization is turned on and debug symbols are not emitted. So, in four steps:


  2. Compile using your new release build config, i.e. with debug symbols and with optimization. Note that 99% of code optimization is done by the JIT compiler, not the language compiler.

  3. Create a text file in your app's folder called xxxx.exe.ini (or dll or whatever), where xxxx is the name of your executable. This text file should initially look like:

    [.NET Framework Debugging Control]

    [.NET Framework Debugging Control]

EDIT According to cateye's comment, this can also work in a hosted environment such as ASP.NET.

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>To answer your second question, using the "Optimise" flag with PDBs >means that those line numbers might be off by a few lines. Are you sure this is true? –  Karsten Jun 18 '09 at 16:33
No, I'm not sure. I've corrected my answer to reflect a difference that I am sure about (stack collapse). I need to investigate the line difference theory in more detail. –  RoadWarrior Aug 19 '09 at 9:05
You should attribute your source - Scott Hanselman hanselman.com/blog/DebugVsReleaseTheBestOfBothWorlds.aspx –  Cristi Diaconescu Feb 23 '11 at 13:41
@Cristi, the source of Scott's blog entry is somebody called Mark Pearce. That's me :-) –  RoadWarrior Feb 25 '11 at 10:58
This post ASP.NET MVC SOURCE DEBUGGING THE EASY WAY can provide a clue to my above question, i.e., just place the .ini file into the asp.net temp folder in which the dll sits. –  cateyes Jun 27 '13 at 4:29
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There is no need to include them in your distribution, but you should definitely be building them and keeping them. Otherwise debugging a crash dump is practically impossible.

I would also turn on optimizations. Whilst it does make debugging more difficult the performance gains are usually very non-trivial depending on the nature of the application. We easily see over 10x performance on release vs debug builds for some algorithms.

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Copy PDBs into production is a good idea ( at least for web sites). See stackoverflow.com/questions/933883/… BTW, if you include PDBs with your deployments, you don't need to keep them in some separate place like a symbol server –  Michael Freidgeim Apr 27 '13 at 21:02
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