January 3, 2026
Pause. Point. Panic.
Profiling with Ctrl-C
Developers hit “Pause” to find bugs — and ignite a lazy-vs-elite brawl
TLDR: A dev says pausing a program with Ctrl‑C can quickly reveal why it’s slow, and it worked for him on real issues. The community split: pragmatists praise the quick fix, while purists warn it’s a crude tool that misses subtle problems—sparking a funny, fiery “lazy vs pro” showdown.
A veteran dev just admitted the unthinkable: sometimes he fixes slow apps by literally hitting Ctrl‑C (aka “pause”) and peeking at where the code froze. It nailed a mystery one‑minute startup and even exposed a blame triangle between compilers, linkers, and the GDB debugger. The confession lit up the comments with equal parts cackling and combat.
Fans cheered the “pause to win” hack. One commenter said the footnotes alone “had me cackling,” while old‑school engineers flexed war stories: auto‑pausing every 0.1 seconds to catch sluggish screens, or using Xcode’s “Pause” to land right on the misbehaving code. The vibe: quick-and-dirty beats perfect-and-late.
But the skeptics rolled in hot. “Sure,” they said, “if one thing is hogging the CPU. What about 20% slowdowns?” Another warned this is just super‑low‑frequency sampling with all the usual pitfalls. Translation: great for obvious bottlenecks, risky for subtle ones.
The drama boiled down to identity: are you a pragmatic fixer or a profiler purist? Memes flew about “zero‑cost abstractions” costing a minute of your life. Love it or hate it, the community agreed on one thing: smashing Pause is the fastest way to start an argument—and sometimes, to ship a fix.
Key Points
- •Interrupting a program (Ctrl-C/pause) in a debugger can quickly reveal where execution time is spent, useful for simple performance issues.
- •A debug build’s one-minute startup delay was traced to heavy JSON parsing via the nlohmann JSON library; subsequent changes resolved it.
- •Switching from gold to LLD aimed to speed linking; mold was faster but unsupported on MIPS.
- •gdb became slower on core dumps linked with LLD despite --gdb-index; interrupting showed time in dwarf_decode_macro_bytes, pointing to DWARF macro handling.
- •Removing -ggdb3 avoided slow linking and gdb slowdown, illustrating practical trade-offs in toolchain configuration.