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I recently discovered a Linux debugger & tool which allowed me to solve problems 10x faster than gdb: pernos.co (which is layered over Mozilla's rr time-trackin

I recently discovered a Linux debugger & tool which allowed me to solve problems 10x faster than gdb: pernos.co (which is layered over Mozilla's rr time-tracking debugger). Pernosco's tool is described pretty well on their website (which is full of minimal fluff and marketing -- another good sign). But basically it allows you to view a program inside and out, forwards /and/ backwards, with zero replay lag. Everything from stack traces to variable displays (at any point in time in your code execution) is extremely easy to view and understand. The best part is the lightning fast search functionality (again: zero lag). On top of this: extraordinary customer service if anything breaks (in my experience, they fix bugs within 24 hours and are highly communicative). I'm not a paid Pernosco shill. I'm just so blown away by this product that I wanted to word-of-mouth spread it around because it's saved so much time for me.

tom_ 6y ago
Relevant recent(ish) HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042827
bogwog 6y ago
That looks cool, but $20/month for 5 submissions is absurd. That's practically a product demo you have to pay for. Seems like the type of tool you'd only use on a really tough and rare bug, but I am not running into those consistently enough to justify a monthly payment. GDB's CLI might be ugly/annoying, but it's still usable and perfectly adequate. Plus it's a cloud service I need to trust with my code? This is a very tough sell. I might pay an annual fee for a local/self-hosted version though, kind of like a Jetbrains subscription.
- jandrese 6y ago
  5 submissions a month means I can't just play around with it to figure out how it works. I'll have to learn its interface while also fighting some particularly difficult bug. Maybe it's a great product, I'll never know.
  - db48x 6y ago
    Don't be so hasty, the first five hits^Hsubmissions are free.
- db48x 6y ago
  You still have to email them to ask about for the on-premises version; they only just got set up to take credit-card payments for the subscription version. I happen to know that they don't have a sales department, so at least there's that. As I understand it, it would be delivered as a pair of docker containers. One is for serving up the UI you see when you're debugging (I think there's one instance of this container per debugging session, but don't quote me on that), and the other ingests rr recordings into the database. A presentation they gave a while back stated that for the cloud version they send all recordings to 36-core AWS instances with 144 GB of ram, that it often takes as much as an hour to process a single recording, and that it can generate a 100GB database. Hopefully most recordings are simpler and quicker than that, but I don't think this is something I'll be running on my laptop in the next few years.

tom_ 6y ago

Relevant recent(ish) HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25042827

bogwog 6y ago

That looks cool, but $20/month for 5 submissions is absurd. That's practically a product demo you have to pay for. Seems like the type of tool you'd only use on a really tough and rare bug, but I am not running into those consistently enough to justify a monthly payment. GDB's CLI might be ugly/annoying, but it's still usable and perfectly adequate. Plus it's a cloud service I need to trust with my code? This is a very tough sell. I might pay an annual fee for a local/self-hosted version though, kind of like a Jetbrains subscription.

jandrese 6y ago
5 submissions a month means I can't just play around with it to figure out how it works. I'll have to learn its interface while also fighting some particularly difficult bug. Maybe it's a great product, I'll never know.
- db48x 6y ago
  Don't be so hasty, the first five hits^Hsubmissions are free.
db48x 6y ago
You still have to email them to ask about for the on-premises version; they only just got set up to take credit-card payments for the subscription version. I happen to know that they don't have a sales department, so at least there's that. As I understand it, it would be delivered as a pair of docker containers. One is for serving up the UI you see when you're debugging (I think there's one instance of this container per debugging session, but don't quote me on that), and the other ingests rr recordings into the database. A presentation they gave a while back stated that for the cloud version they send all recordings to 36-core AWS instances with 144 GB of ram, that it often takes as much as an hour to process a single recording, and that it can generate a 100GB database. Hopefully most recordings are simpler and quicker than that, but I don't think this is something I'll be running on my laptop in the next few years.