I have tendency to be a little short on patience at times. Therfore I usually use Devel::FastProf. It is a perline profiler. It can be used just like dprof:

$ perl -d:FastProf my_script.pl
$ fprofpp -t 10
[download]

Update: Also, here is an article on profiling code and how to understand the data being delivered to you by the profiler. It was helpful to me when I was learning to better profile my code: http://www.ddj.com/184404580.