I have a operation in my project which takes around 2 minutes in debugging mode and less than a second in release mode. (If it matters, it's a function that writes a lot to a vector).
Obviously it's nearly impossible to use my application while in debugging mode due to the terrible performance that piece of code is causing.
So my question is: Is it possible to enable performance optimizations and disable debugging for a specific file or class? If not, any other ways to solve this problem?
There are multiple aspects that affect performance:
Optimization (as you noted). You can specify optimization on a per
file level using Properties -> C/C++ -> Optimization. You can also
use #pragma optimize as described here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/chh3fb0k.aspx
Additional code that is only executed in the DEBUG configuration, like Checked Iterators; you can control them via _SECURE_SCL or _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL as described here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa985965.aspx
Also, you can unconditionally improve the performance of your code, for example, by reserving required space in your vector upfront to avoid reallocation.
