A debug build typically does not use a lot of the optimizations your compiler is able to offer, and also does extra work to help you with trouble-shooting any problems that might occur. In some situations there can be some value to turning on certain optimizations or trying to make your debug build run faster, but as a general rule you should not concern yourself with debug performance.[/quote]
Yes and in particular you should ALWAYS troubleshoot code which doesn't completely consist of method calls (say, you are implementing a binary search etc...) in DEBUG mode. In release mode the compiler may optimize stuff away, move variables and lines of code around, add extra stuff to make things go faster, which will make you want to kill yourself while trying to debug your code. So debug first in debug mode, and once you're absolutely sure your code works, turn on release mode and test performance then and only then