How can I profile template performance in Template::Toolkit?

Question

What's the best method for benchmarking the performance of my various templates when using Template::Toolkit?

I want something that will break down how much cpu/system time is spent processing each block or template file, exclusive of the time spent processing other templates within. Devel::DProf, for example, is useless for this, since it simply tells me how much time is spent in the various internal methods of the Template module.

Answer 1

It turns out that Googling for template::toolkit profiling yields the best result, an article from November 2005 by Randal Schwartz. I can't copy and paste any of the article here due to copyright, but suffice to say that you simply get his source and use it as a module after template, like so:

use Template;
use My::Template::Context;

And you'll get output like this to STDERR when your script runs:

-- info.html at Thu Nov 13 09:33:26 2008:
cnt clk   user    sys  cuser   csys template
  1   0   0.06   0.00   0.00   0.00 actions.html
  1   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 banner.html
  1   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 common_javascript.html
  1   0   0.01   0.00   0.00   0.00 datetime.html
  1   0   0.01   0.00   0.00   0.00 diag.html
  3   0   0.02   0.00   0.00   0.00 field_table
  1   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 header.html
  1   0   0.01   0.00   0.00   0.00 info.html
  1   0   0.01   0.01   0.00   0.00 my_checklists.html
  1   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 my_javascript.html
  1   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 qualifier.html
 52   0   0.30   0.00   0.00   0.00 referral_options
  1   0   0.01   0.00   0.00   0.00 relationship_block
  1   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 set_bgcolor.html
  1   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 shared_javascript.html
  2   0   0.00   0.00   0.00   0.00 table_block
  1   0   0.03   0.00   0.00   0.00 ticket.html
  1   0   0.08   0.00   0.00   0.00 ticket_actions.html
-- end

Note that blocks as well as separate files are listed.

This is, IMHO, much more useful than the CPAN module Template::Timer.