[Templates] Apache::Template performance

[Joe Johnston]

Folks, 

Has anyone benchmarked the performance of Apache::Templates?
Without doing much optimization, it appears that I'm getting unexpectedly
low throughput. Using the ab tool, I'm able to serve about 110 static
HTML pages per second. Using a very simple tt2 (shown below), the throughput
drops to 17 pages per second. Is this precipitous drop normal? I am using 
caching (with the XS module). Any thoughts on how I improve the performance?

Thanks.

The tt2 page:

-----
[% USE CGI %]
[% hostname = CGI.server_name;
   url = "http://" _ CGI.server_name;

   IF hostname.match('searchexpo');
      url = url _ "/se_index.tt2";
   ELSIF hostname.match('canada');
      url = url _ "/cc_index.tt2";
   ELSE;
      url = url _ "/cs_index.tt2";
   END;
%]
[% INCLUDE Header
      redirect = url
%]
-----  

-- 
----------------
Joe Johnston -- http://taskboy.com
Software Consultant: Web - Database - Perl 
"...our power is in argument and persuasion." --Chinua Achebe