Ok, I think this is sound advice. I haven't used Dprof, but I have done some more hackish profiling with TimeHiRes. Since my regexes are actually user-defined, I notice that in some cases they take an enormous amount of processing... for example, a 60kb web page will consume 18 minute of CPU time crunching a complex regex! But the stem of the problem is that I don't have much control over the regex that the user defines, hence I'm still looking for any perf gains. Perhaps I should devise a way to help optimize the users' regular expressions (probably not a simple thing to do aside from end user education.)

Anyways, this is a classic case of programmer (me) vs. end user (with wacky regexes.) Sigh...