Performance differences between debug and release builds

Question

I must admit, that usually I haven\'t bothered switching between the Debug and Release configurations in my program, and I have usually opted to go for the

Answer 1

This heavily depends on the nature of your application. If your application is UI-heavy, you probably won't notice any difference since the slowest component connected to a modern computer is the user. If you use some UI animations, you might want to test if you can perceive any noticeable lag when running in DEBUG build.

However, if you have many computation-heavy calculations, then you would notice differences (could be as high as 40% as @Pieter mentioned, though it would depend on the nature of the calculations).

It's basically a design tradeoff. If you're releasing under DEBUG build, then if the users experiences problems, you can get a more meaningful traceback and you can do much more flexible diagnostic. By releasing in DEBUG build, you also avoid the optimizer producing obscure Heisenbugs.