This is mostly a matter of personal style but I find that maintainability is almost always more important then performance. I would do everything as a single cgi that generates the inital form and even returns a redirect for your one static page. (see example above) It's usualy alot easier to have do deal with only one file for simple stuff. In my mind it's also much better self documenting because you can see the pieces in one place. I would highly rec-o-mend the book cgi programming with perl.