1. A computer system comprising: at least one processor; a memory coupled to the at least one processor, the memory being divided into a plurality of memory pages; shared instructions residing in the memory; a plurality of processes residing in the memory and executed by the at least one processor, the plurality of processes executing the shared instructions; a debugger residing in the memory and executed by the at least one processor, the debugger comprising: a breakpoint processing mechanism that installs a breakpoint by recording an original instruction at a desired location in the shared instructions and writing a trap instruction to the desired location in the shared instructions, the breakpoint processing mechanism passing control to the debugger when a process that installed the breakpoint encounters the trap instruction, the breakpoint processing mechanism skipping the trap instruction and executing the original instruction using a scratchpad memory that is at least an order of magnitude smaller than a smallest size of the plurality of memory pages when a process that did not set the breakpoint at the desired location encounters the trap instruction in the shared instructions.