Are there performance penalties in having debug symbols enabled?

@kaero, @aateeqi, would you be open to opening a PR for this?

@jpkrohling

@kaero, @aateeqi, would you be open to opening a PR for this?

Yes, I would like to implement the feature in the builder in a backward-compatible way as it suggested in #63 (comment) , but I have no idea who and how use releases issued from this repository. We make private builds of the collector using the builder.

I could update builder manifests here too if it would be helpful for users of those releases.

Are there performance penalties in having debug symbols enabled?

Generally speaking, no. Debug symbols are used by debugging facilities in cases they required to, for example when a user attach or run process under a debugger or the Linux perf tool. The only effect everyone who don't care about debugging should notice is the growth of the binary size.

I believe the only place you'd need to change is this:

I believe the only place you'd need to change is this:

I don't see, how it would help binaries built using the OpenTelemetry builder command line tool.

Sorry, I missed that part!

We make private builds of the collector using the builder.

This would be the place to remove it:
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/blob/88e9c86f2d32c224a488a5a4935cdafcafc5b943/cmd/builder/internal/builder/main.go#L89

I think we can externalize it in a config property.

I think this issue is still relevant today. Looking at the builder code, we can override ld flags only when debug compilation property is set to true. Is there a way to only override ld flags?

The purpose here is to keep debug symbols and DWARF data without setting those GCflags.