*SOLVED* High-speed Date Formatting

[Endless]

Hello my new favorite friends,

As part of a lexical processing project I'm working on, I'm parsing millions of dates and converting them to Epoch time. However, Diag::NYTProf showed me that I was losing massive amounts of time by using use Date::Parse::str2time; I guess that's the price you pay for something that seemed like the perfect, effortless way to parse the dates.

So, my question is, how can I most efficiently parse these dates, for those of you who have a sense of the benchmarks? Here was the WRONG way (removing it doubled my speed!):

# Dates of form 'Fri, 01 Mar 2013 01:21:14 +0000'
my $created_at = str2time($value);

Update: Solution

Thanks to the discussion between BrowserUK and rjt I high-speed solution came that looked something like this:

use Inline C => q@
int epoch_sec(char * date) {
    char *tz_str = date + 26;
    struct tm tm;
    int tz;

    if (  strlen(date) != 31                           ||
        strptime(date, "%a, %d %b %Y %T", &tm) == NULL ||
          sscanf(tz_str, "%d", &tz) != 1)
    {
        printf("Invalid date %s\n", date);
        return 0;
    }

    return timegm(&tm) - 
        (tz < 0 ? -1 : 1)*(abs(tz)/100*3600 + abs(tz)%100*60);
}
@;

our $date = "Fri, 01 Mar 2013 01:21:14 +0200";
my $newDate = epoch_sec($date);
say $newDate;

Thanks! You guys are incredible.