I really don't think having perl to compile, say, 32K file versus 8K file adds a significant overhead. Besides, as some people rightly noticed, if you use CGI one of the major overheads is having to load perl compiler on each call. So you might want to extract some common functionality of your program in a module to provide for convenience and code reuse, but you don't need to split your main script into smaller pieces. Anyone who thinks otherwise can try benchmarking different approaches.