A few years ago I wrote about my Problems with CDB Debugger in QtCreator. And a few months ago debugging started getting slower and slower and it finally reached a point where the program would need a minute or more just to start and stopping for a breakpoint was almost a coffee break situation. The old remedy wasn't helping anymore — this was something new.

While searching for a cure I stumbled upon Qt mailing list thread where the culprit was identified. It's Microsoft's symbol server!

Just go to Options -> Debugger -> CDB Paths tab and make sure srv* path is below cache* (or just remove it altogether). Looks like server symbols are preferred over local symbol cache if on top and that server is now terribly slow.

Some time ago Locals and Expressions view in QtCreator just stopped working for me. No locals were listed when the program stopped on a breakpoint, watches did not show the values, hovering with the mouse over a variable in the editor did not show its value in a tooltip. No fiddling with IDE options helped. This was on Windows using compiler from Visual C++ and CDB as a debugger.

It was quite annoying but I was mostly working on UI at that time and could live with occasional dumping of few variables into a log. Few weeks later I moved to some math heavy stuff and the situation became desperate — I had to fix this!

At first, I suspected the debugger or the compiler. Since reinstalling and trying different versions did not help I also tried different versions of Qt and QtCreator itself. Still broken. And Googling for broken CDB only revealed problems with CDB getting unusably slow.

After QtCreator reinstall, I noticed the settings were preserved from the old version. So maybe they are somehow corrupted?  I found them in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\QtProject\qtcreator\, made a backup of that folder, and deleted it. And it started working! Locals and Expressions were back!

Of course, I also wanted my old settings back. So I switched back to the old settings and started QtCreator again and to my surprise it still worked! I took a closer look and saw that the problem lies in the session file (*.qws) — when I previously deleted the settings folder QtCreator created a new session for me and this one I reopened in the IDE after the switch back to the old settings (just copied the files into the folder so the new session file stayed there).

So I opened the session file with an intention to start deleting suspicious stuff until it works. It's a XML file and apart from one big base64 blob there is not much else. Besides a breakpoint list, the only thing that seemed related to debugging was a list of maybe ten old watch expressions (which were not listed in the IDE anymore!). I deleted it and voilà, I could see the values of locals and variables again!

After a few weeks, debugging started to get slow. Stepping over code took a few seconds and values of the variables showed up only after considerable time (tens of seconds). This time I knew what to do, deleting watch expressions from the session file helped again. So I came to the conclusion that in the first case the values could eventually show up after a few minutes (stepping over code was not slowed down though). It was just very very slow. Then the Googled complaints about slow CDB made more sense to me. And indeed, I found out someone fixed it the same way but I was not paying attention to just slow debugging before, I was looking for broken debugging!

Recapitulation

1. Debugging in QtCreator using CDB in Windows is very slow and/or values of locals and expressions never show up.
2. Go to the folder where QtCreator stores your session file (C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\QtProject\qtcreator\).
3. Open the session file (*.qws) in text editor and look for this XML subtree:

   <data>
       <variable>value-Watchers</variable>
       <valuelist type="QVariantList">
           <value type="QString">some expression 1</value>
           <value type="QString">some expression 2</value>
           <value type="QString">some expression 3</value>
       </valuelist>
   </data>
   

4. Delete this subtree (or just the expressions) and save the file.
5. Start QtCreator, open the fixed session, and do some debugging.

Edit: If this doesn't help check also Debugging with CDB in QtCreator Agonizingly Slow.