rack-mini-profiler is a lightweight performance profiling tool for Ruby and Rails applications. It adds a developer-friendly speed badge to every page, displaying SQL queries, rendering times, and detailed call-stack profiling. It is widely used by developers to diagnose performance issues early. 

Its strengths are ease of setup, actionable insights, and negligible overhead in development mode, while its weaknesses include limited production profiling features. 

Alternatives include Skylight or New Relic for production-grade monitoring.