V15 Performance decrease when running in debug

Although it is normal to see some decrease in performance when running an application in debug, the impact can be significantly greater when using CLI/C++ which is what the LEADTOOLS .NET assemblies were written in. This allows us to use both managed and unmanaged code to speed up memory intensive processing.

Visual Studio 2005 includes a debugging assistant called MDA (Managed Debugging Assistant). This basically acts as a hook and when in debug, it constantly checks the entire managed subsystem (stack, etc) to make sure nothing happened whenever there is a call made between unmanaged/native code. This can cause a huge hit on performance.

The solution is to disable the MDA and there seems to be a few different ways to do this. You have the option of disabling the MDA via a registry key or an environment variable. The below link has more information on the MDA and how to disable it. Either method may also require that you disable the Visual Studio Hosting Process.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d21c150d(VS.80).aspx