Extreme debugger performance issue with Visual Studio in debug build configuration

[kamrann]

Specifically with the debug build configuration, attempting to start the editor with the Visual Studio debugger attached causes Visual Studio to become unresponsive for a prolonged period, during which its memory usage (specifically that of Visual Studio Remote Debugger, though debugging was local) gradually increases to an unreasonable level. Although memory usage eventually drops back down, the IDE remains largely unusable for the duration of the debugging session.

Steps to reproduce

1. On Windows, build the Editor target in debug configuration.
2. Ensure Editor is set as the active startup project.
3. Hit F5 to start debugging.

Expected behavior
Startup performance (specifically talking only about startup of the process itself at the OS level/attachment of the debugger, not performance of the process once running which obviously will be worse in debug) and VS memory usage should not be so vastly different from profile configuration.

Actual behavior
VS becomes unresponsive for a long time and uses large amounts of memory, before the O3DE splash screen even appears. On my machine (somewhat low spec but fine in profile configuration), memory usage gradually crept up to 20GB over a period of around 1 minute before the process appeared to make any progress, compared to a few seconds and ~4GB in profile.

Commit ID from o3de/o3de Repository
8e66ace

Desktop/Device

• Device: PC
• OS: Windows
• Version: 10
• CPU: Intel i7-8809G
• Memory: 32GB
• Visual Studio 2022 16.9

Additional context
Technically this is perhaps a Visual Studio bug (there's no good justification for this level of unresponsiveness), but filing here as it appears there is something fundamentally different about the build configurations (perhaps relating to how debug info is generated?) which may explain this and point to a potential fix.