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Importing symbols from a loaded diff in IDA is significantly slower than a diff performed within IDA

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#3 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp

Research direction

Reproduce the issue in IDA using large binaries and compare symbol imports from a fresh diff with imports from saved diff results. Trace the BinExport2 and google::protobuf::MessageLite::ParsePartialFromIstream call paths described in the report, then verify that saved results no longer load BinExport files once per symbol and that import time is comparable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug enhancement

Steps to reproduce the problem:

  1. Load two large binaries and create IDBs
  2. Bindiff one of them against the other
  3. Import a couple of symbols and note the time it takes
  4. Save the diff results
  5. Restart IDA
  6. Load saved diff results
  7. Import the same number of symbols and again note the time it takes.

What is the expected behavior?

It should take about the same amount of time.

What went wrong?

I bindiffed bindiff (haha) against binexport and put breakpoints on calls to BinExport2::BinExport2 and google::protobuf::MessageLite::ParsePartialFromIstream. When working with a fresh diff performed within IDA bindiff does not load the binexport file for every symbol, but when working with loaded diff results binexport will load the binexport files for EACH symbol that's being ported.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system? Bindiff 7, windows x64, IDA 7.6.210427

Any other comments? No

Ported from b/199001147

Dominant language
Java
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