Update: It was Filter::Indent::HereDoc which depends on Filter::Simple, which I believe depends on Text::Balanced. Took out F::I::H, re-indented all my HereDocs, and things fly. I am back in happy land, partially. I really do hate having to slide my HereDocs to the 0th column of the page instead of aligning neatly with the other prettily indented code. How do monks deal with this, if they do?

Thanks to BrowserUk's guidance, I got valuable mileage out of Devel::SmallProf. Fiddling around with various options, then going through the output, I have narrowed down the problem to Text::Balanced (see the top 8 worst perf hits below).

Text/Balanced.pm
count wall tm  cpu time   line
47236 14.17731 13.93000   921:    if (ref($func) eq 'CODE')
21983 7.933862 7.570000   952:   if ($$textref =~ /\G(.)/gcs)
47236 1.307192 3.120000   918:    $func = $func[$i];
47236 1.252747 3.180000   930:    if (defined($field) && length($field
+))
47236 1.168986 2.850000   919:    $class = $class[$i];
47236 1.068727 3.260000   920:    $lastpos = pos $$textref;
47236 1.064919 3.290000   929:    $pref ||= "";
25253 1.048240 2.080000   915:   foreach my $i ( 0..$#func )
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Since I didn't directly call this module in use, obviously I am doing something that is calling its services. The modules I am using are --

• HTML::Template
• CGI::Simple
• CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser set_message)
• Exporter
• Time::Local
• DBI
• HTML::Template
• Filter::Indent::HereDoc
• Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday tv_interval)

I am also doing a bunch of regexp matching (does that call T::B?), but that seems to be very, very fast in the smallprof.out.

More guidance welcome. Where I am bringing in T::B? What can I do to avoid it, or to speed it.

Many thanks to everyone thus far.