I’ve noticed that when I start up a program that sets up a couple different frames with OpenGL contexts, it will open almost instantly normally, but the context setup seems to take about one second per frame if I run it under a debugger. I see the same effect in both the Delphi debugger and the Visual Studio debugger, so it appears to be a general problem and not specific to one IDE. I’ve also heard reports of similar slowdowns when the accelerated video system is D3D based, which leads me to think that it’s not specific to OpenGL.
Does anyone know why having a debugger attached in general causes accelerated video contexts in general to initialize very slowly?
When run under the debugger, a special debug version of the heap is used. That may be what is slowing your program down. More details here, including instructions on how to disable it. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff538841(v=VS.85).aspx