Do .pdbs slow down a release application?

Question

If a .pdb (program debug) file is included with a .dll then line numbers appear in the stack trace of any exception thrown. Does this affect the performance of the applicati

Answer 1

Not normally. PDBs and optimizations are orthogonal. One can be enabled regardless of the value of the other option. However, it might reduce performance if you want to actually use the information contained in PDB, like when you are accessing the StackTrace of an exception and it needs to get line numbers from PDB or when you call new StackTrace(true).

By the way, Eric Lippert has a related blog entry about compiler optimizations.