Valgrind was huge when it became available early in the 21st century, for finding leaks but also because and gave us engineers ammunition to use against management to keep our development systems running on Linux.
There were other profiling tools before then, but they were extremely pricey.
Bit surprised - just found out that Valgrind was first released in Feb 2002. It turns out, i've been using it since it's almost first days, 2002 for sure. Had no idea.
There were other profiling tools before then, but they were extremely pricey.