gdb: howto speedup debugging on a very large binary?

Is there a way to speed up gdb when it loads a very large c++ binary?

The binary I am talking about is about 50MB in a release build (no debug symbol开发者_如何学运维s)

A debug build is bigger then 400MB and gdb needs more then 2 minutes to load it.

Maybe there are some settings that speed up loading the application into gdb ?

Any help is very appreciated!

Environment: ubuntu karmic 64bit with gdb v6.8, 32GB Ram, 8 cpu-cores

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Begin by upgrading to GDB 7.0.1. GDB developers have spent quite a bit of effort in 2009 making GDB 7.0 faster (and there is more to come in 7.1 :-)