Understand, this particular page was doing a huge amount of processing (a lot of nested loops) before producing results. The actual page generation was done after the processing, and was essentially a single print statement, e.g., print join( "\n", header, start_html, ..., end_html ), so there were no speed issues in that regard (trust me -- there might have been, but in this case there weren't).

My point was that, after accounting for the process startup time, compile time, etc. of an otherwise standard CGI Perl program, the net run time was probably about three seconds (give or take a half second or so). In contrast, the Java Servlet implementing the same algorithm took roughly five seconds (also, give or take about a half second).

In my opinion, Perl beats (non-JIT inlined) Java in raw performance.