I'm looking for some places I can squeeze a little bit more performance out of a sub. dprof says this sub is running 50% of the time for my application, so it looks like my best candidate for optimization.

# Print the given template sections to the supplied filehandle
sub printto
{
  my $self = shift;
  my $fh = shift;
  my $ret = 0;
  my($val,$sec,$v);
  for(;@_;shift)
  {
    $sec = $self->[_sec]{$_[0]};
    if (!defined($sec))
    {
      print $fh $self->_nosuchsec($_[0]);
      next;
    }
    $ret++;
    foreach $v (@$sec)
    {
      if ($v->[_type] == type_text)
      {
        print $fh $v->[_contents];
      }
      else
      {
        $val = $self->[_assign]{$v->[_contents]};
        print $fh defined($val) ? $val 
                                : $self->_nosuchvar($val,"\$".$val);
      }
    }
  }
  $ret;
}
[download]

This is the output routine for a templating engine. It takes as parameters an object, a filehandle, and zero or more template section names to display. For each template section name, if the section exists it displays all parts of it. A part is either plain text, or else a variable; variables are looked up in the $self->[_assign] hashref. The _nosuchsec and _nosuchvar routines are error handlers, and are never called in normal operation.

Here's what DProf says:

%Time ExclSec CumulS #Calls sec/call Csec/c  Name
 51.9   21.53 21.280 130000   0.0002 0.0002  FTS::printto

Any ideas where to look for that last little bit of performance?

Thanks!

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