Does using the --inspect flag have any performance implications?

[kylecombes]

I'm configuring VS Code debugging for a Next.js app, and my initial thought was to just change our dev script in our package.json to be NODE_OPTIONS='--inspect' next dev. This would obviously mean that anytime a dev ran our app, it would run with this flag, even if the dev didn't need to debug the Node process.

I'm trying to determine whether using this flag has any performance implications, but the only "answers" I've found to this question are the two "feelings" expressed in this Stack Overflow question. Can anyone here provide a more evidence-based opinion?

[Trott]

@nodejs/diagnostics

[Trott]

If you don't have something you can benchmark yourself, and since your request is specifically for data over general sense, you might want to take a look at doc/guides/writing-and-running-benchmarks.md and note especially that createBenchmark() takes an options argument that allows you to specify command-line flags. You can use that to modify an existing benchmark to run with --inspect and then run it without --inspect and compare the results.

[devsnek]

enabling the inspector does not hurt perf but connecting to it tiers down all the wasm, and trying to step or pause js causes that js to tier down.