Apples and oranges. Profiling is not about timing; profiling tells you 'where' your code spends it's time. Where your code 'is' useful is timing long runs of linear code whereas the Benchmark module is useful for snippets of code and getting at the internals of subroutines without measuring the subroutine call itself. As to just storing time(), actually I've done that myself on occasion but usually I use the Time::HiRes module.