Cocoa: Break on every method call?-Collection of common programming errors

I think your current approach of putting a breakpoint on each method of interest is the best bet. As @Tommy explained, there’s a small number of message dispatch functions in the runtime that you can break on, but I having the debugger evaluate a conditional breakpoint on every single message send will probably slow your application down significantly.

One way to make setting your breakpoints a little easier is to do it from a GDB command file. Put the commands to set the breakpoints for all the methods of interest in a single file that you can load at the beginning of your debug session. Setting all the breakpoints in a single file gives you one place to edit the list, and editing the file should be easy with copy and paste.

Perhaps the best solution, but the one that’ll take a little time to master, is to use Instruments. You’ll want to read up on the DTrace mechanism first, but you can easily create a custom instrument with probes on each of the methods of interest. Instruments is incredibly powerful, but it takes some time to learn to really use it.