It is my contention that Perl (once compiled) runs noticably faster than Java (obviously using similar code), at least on the machines I ran tests on (a 300mhz dual-CPU Ultrasparc workstation running Solaris 2.6 and a 700Mhz PC running NT 4.0 SP6a).

A consulting client had a web-page generated by Perl using CGI, and I re-implemented it in Java. There was a pure text manipulation part of the code (sorry, it was proprietary and I wasn't able to take it with me), which took about five seconds to produce an output web page using Perl 5.005_03 on Solaris 2.6.

The same thing, written as a Java 1.18 Servlet (under JServ 1.0, with Apache 1.3.2 on the same web server) also took five seconds to run and produce the results page.

If that sounds the same, note well that the Perl implementation was a vanilla CGI program (i.e., no mod_perl, FastCGI or the like), so that five seconds includes the standard Solaris process-startup delay plus the Perl startup/compile delay.

I would have loved to pursue this further, but unfortunately my contract ended first.

In reply to Re: Perl speed VS. other languages by dmmiller2k
in thread Perl speed VS. other languages by tretin

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