Yes, my motiviation in asking this question is that if it becomes "common knowledge" among the IT managers of the largest companies that Java is faster than Perl, then the days of Perl programmers are numbered.

It could be argued that if large, bloated companies working on large, bloated projects use a large, bloated language in an unfailingly poor way, then they will be utterly destroyed in business by nimble, agile software developers working in small, well-knit units. (Or have their product cloned on Sourceforge by a few hundred slackers.)