I think punchcard_don has asked an interesting question. Enquiring minds want to know why java did so much better than perl in that case.

pg has suggested architecture issues, while perrin has suggested investigating cgi technology and code profiling.

As I see it, the ball is back in punchcard_don's court to get this info for further contemplation.

I once got bitten by the piggish perl module "Math::BigInt". By replacing that with custom code, my app ran 30 times faster. So, I'm suggesting that something simple like that could be responsible for the apparent poor performance by perl. This can be identified by code profiling.