How Tracepoints Influence Execution Speed of Your Sketch

Note IconNote:

Remember: Tracepoints are like breakpoints, but they do not stop sketch execution, but transmit information about your running sketch to the PC, when passed.
Read more on how to control if breakpoints halt execution ("breakpoint") or not ("tracepoint")


If you have tracepoints that are hit with a very high rate per second, then Visual Micro will slow the board down to a maximum of approximately 10-12 tracepoint messages per second.

This prevents the PC from being flooded with messages causing it to fall behind "real-time".
This retarding mechanism is called the "debugger throttle".

However, in some cases, a huge volume of trace messages might be required in bursts, followed by a "quiet" period with no trace messages.
In this situation the throttle would not be required because the PC is given periods of time to process and clear the inbound debugger trace message queue and it might be annoying to have the Arduino slowed down.

Then you can influence the throttle behavior with the project properties settings described here.