Node: Need Debug Symbol (PDB) for Windows platform

Created on 14 Mar 2016 · 17Comments · Source: nodejs/node

Hey Guys,
Just noticed node.pdb was not shipped with the official node release. Can we please bring this back?

This is extremely helpful for postmortem debugging node application on windows platform. I don't like to build whole node because just want the PDB file.

thanks,
Wei

build feature request post-mortem windows

Source

kexuelou

👍6

Most helpful comment

@AArnott it's in the win-x64 or win-x86 directories, take your pick from:

rvagg on 21 Nov 2017

👍5

All 17 comments

/cc @nodejs/build

mscdex on 14 Mar 2016

We haven't shipped this since io.js v1, including Node.js v4 and v5 and this is the first complaint. I'd like to understand how useful this file really is. /cc @nodejs/platform-windows

rvagg on 14 Mar 2016

It is useful to have the pdb symbol files available for debugging. If the installer size is a concern, we could make the pdb files separately downloadable.

ofrobots on 14 Mar 2016

What size are we talking about?

jbergstroem on 14 Mar 2016

I don't think the PDBs should be included in the main installer. But it would indeed be useful to have them available as a separate download. e.g. they could be dropped in https://nodejs.org/dist/v5.8.0/win-x86/ (and x64).

davidebbo on 14 Mar 2016

I've not been on Windows in a while but last I remember, some installers gave you the option to install PDBs or not while going through the installation wizard. I think that would be ideal, the option to choose. Now if omitting PDBs has been done due to saving some download size, this suggestion would violate that and would likely not be a good suggestion. Like @jbergstroem, I too would be interested in knowing the size impact for including the PDBs both for on-disk and over the wire.

whitlockjc on 14 Mar 2016

The PDB for v0.12.12 is about 32 MB. I wager that makes it too big to ship as an optional part of the installer but it could be made available as a separate download.

Looking at common.gypi, I think we still generate it as part of the build, we just don't distribute it anymore ('DebugInformationFormat': 3, which translates to /Zi.) I don't have a Windows machine on hand to test but there should be a Release/node.exe.pdb after a successful build.

bnoordhuis on 15 Mar 2016

The PDB for current master is 62 MB (compresses to 17 MB zip and 11 MB 7z).

joaocgreis on 15 Mar 2016

Actually, if we are doing this, we should generalize this to other platforms too (see: https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Separate-Debug-Files.html).

ofrobots on 15 Mar 2016

This is required specially for post mortem debugging. Another concern here is even I build nodejs myself, I can't find the v8dbg_* symbols which is helpful for debugging jscript objects.

kexuelou on 17 Mar 2016

I don't Windows much but I'd argue that file size suggests a separate download.

jbergstroem on 17 Mar 2016

@jbergstroem agreed, separate download is the way to go.

davidebbo on 17 Mar 2016

I needed PDB's too, so I have used an excellent @appveyor service to build node with PDB.

Here are my changes needed to support that.

Of course @nodejs is not going to use appveyor.yml, but I think they could use my vcbuild.bat changes.

One important thing: Before launching vcbuild.bat I am creating an S: substed drive, so that all source paths refer to S:\node\.... according to a very good suggestion (archive.org mirror). Not sure if this feature should a part of vcbuild.bat or maybe it should be included in the build infrastructure the nodejs is using.

I have built node engines with VC2013 and VC2015 successfully and PDBs appear to work properly. My artifacts can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.saper.info/incoming/node/builds/ and here are the build logs.

saper on 5 Apr 2016

Is there any way that I can get the pdbs for v4.4.1 or do I have to build my own node.exe? 32-bit node is crashing for me and I'd like to investigate why.

daniel-white on 8 Apr 2016

available as of the latest v6 release https://nodejs.org/download/release/latest-v6.x/

rvagg on 8 Jun 2016

👍1

@rvagg I can't find the PDB at the link you provided. Where can we find the pdb for the official node 6.4 distribution for win-x86? We have a lot of crash dumps and we need the PDB to see the full callstacks to see why it's crashing.