I would have to say that it is. For a recent project, I created a data replication program that provided a semi-real-time legacy feed to a new web application that we were developing. The system was transactional and used the internet for forwarding the information. For our test we used one of our own workstations as a server running IIS and Perl in out of process CGI mode. The script was able to handle thousands of request with little difficulty. When pointed at the web application, it brought the web app to its knees. The web application had to be put on a very hefty machine in order to handle the same volume as our test server (workstation). The web app was a pure J2EE solution that had some serious tuning done to it. The test server was running on a standard workstation, without tuning, in a very slow Perl CGI configuration. The Java solution took days to write and implement, the Perl solution took about 15 minutes.