When symbol servers are enabled in IDEs, the first launch can be painfully slow (especially JetBrains Rider) because they download symbol files (.pdb)s sequentially. When debugging applications with many modules (like, Unreal Engine) this is simply unbearable. Inspired by Superluminal Performance's parallel symbol resolver, this utility allows you to run multiple symbol downloads in parallel.
The GUI is based on .NET 8. You will be prompted to install the right version on the first launch if you don't have it installed. Then, point local symbol cache path to where the IDE cache symbols. For example, you want to set it to F:\SymbolCache if that's where it is in Visual Studio:
Or JetBrains Rider:
Then, disable symbol servers in the IDE and launch your application. Now, locate and click it in the process list or use the search box to start parallel symbol downloading. Once it is finished, re-launch your app with symbol servers enabled and you should enjoy locally cached symbols.
If you want to launch workers manually, you can use:
symbol-download-worker.exe pID workerId numTotalWorkers path-to-symbol-cache-and-server
An example, assuming UnrealEditor.exe's PID is 37388, and we want to download 10 symbols in parallel (which means 10 workers) from https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols into local cache F:\SymbolCache, the command line for worker #0 will look like:
symbol-download-worker.exe 37388 0 10 cache*F:\SymbolCache;srv*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
Notice how the local cache location is prepended with cache* and the server is prepended with srv* and how they are separated by a semicolon ;. This is required by dbghelp.
Start cmd shell and execute
for /l %x in (0, 1, 9) do start symbol-download-worker.exe 37388 %x 10 cache*F:\SymbolCache;srv*https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
will launch 10 workers (numbered 0-9) populating your symbol cache.
Open ParallelSymbolDownloader.sln, right click on project GUI and select publish. Then click the publish button. Build products are in x64\Release.