All state is tracked while a program is running, so you can debug in the past.

Perf is probably the most widely used general purpose performance debugging tool on Linux. There are multiple contenders for the #2 spot, and, like perf, they’re sampling profilers. Sampling profilers are great. They tend to be easy-to-use and low-overhead compared to most alternatives. However, there are large classes of performance problems sampling profilers can’t debug effectively, and those problems are becoming more important.