How to speed up Memory Validator by changing DbgHelp version

Recently we’ve had a few customers contact to tell us they have experienced a dramatic reduction in speed when using Memory Validator.

Buffered File Access

We found this puzzling as we hadn’t really noticed this. We investigated and found that some parts of our code were hitting the disk a bit too much. To address this we implemented a buffered file read/write system so that we hit the disk once rather than many times. For our test case (which was a substantial program being monitored) this worked wonders. Performance improved enormously. Smiles all round.

DbgHelp

But our customers still reported problems. This was puzzling. We started logging everything in one particular code path (which we knew was the problem). Nothing obvious. The next step, start timing all the logging. But just before we got to that we did a simple test. We iterated through each version of DbgHelp.dll that C++ Memory Validator can supply – if you remember we let you specify which Visual Studio version you used and we supply a version of DbgHelp.dll that ships and works for that (not all DbgHelp.dll are equal!).

Imagine our surprise when we found that DbgHelp.dll (6.11.1.404) shipped prior to Visual Studio 2013 are blazingly fast and the DbgHelp.dll we supply for use with Visual Studio 2013/2015 (6.3.9431.0) are slow. If you’re paying attention you’ll also notice the DbgHelp.dll version number has decreased rather than increased – ask Microsoft, we have no idea why they decreased the version number with more recent releases.

Workaround

For now, until we can get a new release out to address this anomaly we recommend that you ignore choosing the Visual Studio you are using and deliberately choose Visual Studio 2012. This will select DbgHelp 6.11.1.404 and you should find the usual blazing speeds you are used to are restored.

To change the version of DbgHelp used, open the settings dialog, go to Symbol Lookup then change the version in the combo box. Click OK.

Any problems, as usual, please contact support.