The controls and options are deeper and it is much more robust. Starman starts dropping requests and such under load. I suspect my problems were largely an edge case caused by legacy code and EOL'd Linux but I had nothing but straight up segfaults and mysterious socket failures pointing to ancient unconfirmed tickets trying to get Starman working at work. Here is one of many benchmarks out there. I really wanted to like Starman better. I'm gung-ho for Perl even when it's not the best option but in this case, for me at least, there was nothing at all to recommend the Perl side.