Are benchmarks really *that* important between things like PHP and Perl? To me, the difference between serving 50 and 60 requests/second in irrelevant (50 and 200, maybe I would think more of). I generally care more about the response time on the user end.

Any of you who have talked to me, know I dislike PHP, and try to avoid it at all costs. But, when thinking in the scope of a large scale CGI application, it comes down to what is the better tool for the job. If you have zero backend to the app (unlikely), then maybe right now PHP would be a viable solution (just as Perl, or Cold Fusion, ASP or even Python would be, but who knows how all designers make their decisions). But, when you think of scalability, extendability, and having to do any backend work to help support the application, PHP, ASP and the like become less viable. There is nothing more messy than an application with multiple languages making it work. IMO, it is best to use one language for all of the software (ok, I do admit I use shell scripting for cron or setup scripts a lot). A front end in PHP, with a backend in Perl can really suck to manage (believe me, I know). When you think of this, and all the other things that go into designing a CGI app, benchmarks which are pretty close become less of a deciding factor in what tool to use.

</RANT>

Cheers,
KM