How can I do core dump analysis for a production application in UNIX/Linux?

I have come across an option to do core dump analysis by using GDB - it mentions that I need to build the executable with special command line parameters to include merging of symbols information. But it increases the executable size, and I am guessing that it will slow down an application. Can someone please advice if there is another method to do core dump analysis without effecting performance of an applica开发者_JAVA百科tion?

Debug symbols will not slow down the application. You can work with split debug symbols as follows.

gcc -ggdb -o target obj1.o obj2.o ...
strip target --only-keep-debug -o target.dbg
strip target

Then in gdb, use symbol-file target.dbg