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I mostly use GUI-based debuggers (and profilers), but even in this case I found it often useful to pause the program at random times when it appears "stuck".

Most of the time I don't event need to reach for a profiler proper.

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Random sampling is not only useful for quick and dirty debugging, but also for engineering nuclear bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis–Hastings_algorithm#...

few phenomena in daily life are either quicker or dirtier than a nuclear bomb

Of course, a lot of that old neutron transport work is now used for ray tracing in cinema production. Metropolis (and MCMC is general) is one, and I also remember some sort of volumetric scattering thing as well.

Yes, exactly, I do this all the time. Only after having exhausted this, which I consider to be the low-hanging fruits of performance gains, do I start profiling code with an actual profiler.

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