I agree that Perl is starting to gain a bad reputation on the web. mod_php is safe to use on shared hosting and mod_perl is not, which leads some people (even fairly experienced developers) to believe that PHP is just naturally faster. I've heard that mod_perl2 solves this with its perchild MPM, which (I think) gives each script its own namespace and runs it as its owner, but I don't expect speedy adoption.