in reply to localtime/strftime not behaving as expected
Question answered (more or less) above; now a suggestion:
If you didn't program your executable by toggling in binary, it wasn't really programming!
For a job like this, you probably want to use Devel-NYTProf, Devel::DProf or Devel::Profile (the first tends to be preferred these days).
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Seekers of Perl Wisdom