Stop using Devel::DProf. It has been replaced by Devel::NYTProf. You'll get much better information.
Run your page requests 10-100 times in one profiling session, or wait to enable the profiler until after the first request. If you don't, the setup time will swallow everything else.
Profile a real application, or at least something with a database request in it. If you profile a "hello world" app you'll wind up spending hours working on things that increase performance by 0.1%.
I think it would be a mistake to use HTML::Template::Pro. Its only real speed advantage is when running as CGI, and if you care about performance, you should be using mod_perl or FastCGI. There are faster templating tools than HTML::Template, but I've never seen it be the bottleneck in any real application.
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
