your point is well taken - I use AUTOLOAD a lot, and have never found a need to do this. But AUTOLOAD is not the only overhead to be avoided - theres also stack walking that could be avoided.

truth be told - this is for a possible patch to Log::Log4perl, whose authors are rightly concerned with performance, since the impact of inefficiencies can add up VERY quickly doing logging across an entire system.

btw - Im starting to look at optimizer.pm - which may be the complete answer.. Any elaboration on this is welcome.