Thanks for the reply Limbic~Region. I didn't know about the caching built into Time::Local, and I will definitely look into it. Please note that I do still use Time::Local, but I only call it once per each day found in my log, rather than tens of thousands of times per day.

Also, though I didn't mention it in my original post, I did make extensive use of Devel::DProf. As mentioned later in a reply from diotalevi, it really is easy to use, and the results are quite useful. I highly recommend it for anybody interested in improving the speed of their code, and probably should have said something about it in my original post. Between this and Benchmark, determining where to speed up one's program is all but simple. :)

I totally agree with the rest of your post too. My first optimization-related SoPW brought to my attention the problem using test data that is not exactly representative -- though it wasn't a huge issue there. And in the case of both subroutines, a new algorithm combined with caching was indeed the way I gained the huge performance increases. Again thanks for the reply.

Update: on further investigation, I'm not sure how useful Time::Local's caching will be in my situation. It caches at the month level, whereas I'm caching at the day level. Since my logs span only about a week of time, and month-level caching would still result in 10s of thousands more full timelocal calls than I currently do, I think it won't help me too much. (Note: this is all untested speculation. Please be advised to destroy my assumptions at will.)