I joined a research project a while back that was mostly about squeezing performance out of something and testing various configurations. The previous researche

I joined a research project a while back that was mostly about squeezing performance out of something and testing various configurations. The previous researcher had set up a fancy metric collector that was cumbersome, besides also affecting the performance a little. I replaced it with printf + a Python script that parses logs. That said, I was pleasantly surprised I was able to attach a debugger to that system. Some bugs really needed it.