Thursday, December 18, 2008

Symbol Server Performance Improvement

Once you've fallen in love with your own symbol server you might discover bad performance the bigger the symbol store grows.
We've recently moved our private symbol server onto a new server and found in the symhttp.doc the following:

Normally files are placed in a symbol store with a single tier directory structure in which a single subdirectory exists to store all versions of a certain filename. Such a tree may look like this

c:\symstore\ntdll.dll\

c:\symstore\ntdll.pdb\

c:\symstore\kernel32.dll\

c:\symstore\kernel32.pdb\

However if you are going to store a massive amount of filenames, you may prefer to use the two-tier structure. To do this, place a file called index2.txt in the root of c:\symstore. The contents of the file are of no importance. This would result in a tree that looks like this

c:\symstore\nt\ntdll.dll\

c:\symstore\nt\ntdll.pdb\

c:\symstore\ke\kernel32.dll\

c:\symstore\ke\kernel32.pdb\

The added layer of directories allows you to use DFS or directory junctions to manage and split up your files.

Putting the empty index2.txt in the root is not really a task to mention, but what happens to all the files you have added over time?
As a software developer I tend to do things the lazy way. So rerunning symstore on the old configurations is something for those having killed father and mother.
Thanks to the power of LINQ and NConsoler I could write a handy tool in minutes that does the migration stuff for me (and you).

image

Lay back and feel the speed ;-)


[Please backup the symbol store before migration - I give no warranty!]