A single method call is about 30 percent slower than a regular call to the same subroutine

These days the performance hit for method calls is around 10-15%. I imagine that the caching of method lookups has got better over time.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw( cmpthese );

{   package Foo;
    sub new { bless {}, shift }
    sub self { $_[0] }
}

my $o = Foo->new;

cmpthese(-1, {
    subroutine  =>  sub { my $o = Foo::self( $o ) },
    method      =>  sub { my $o = $o->self },
});

__END__
# perl 5.8.7 on my box gives...
               Rate     method subroutine
method     579231/s         --       -10%
subroutine 643109/s        11%         --
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