I would ask the following: What is the development timeline of this project? Are there many users of this web project, or just a few that do intensive things? If you have a short timeline to develop, or expect few users (but the ones who do are doing intensive operations), then I think python would be the way to go. Its blazingly fast to develop and prototype, but as a web-language, its not very efficient (unless you forgo running it in apache and run the app as a twisted-python server) If you're looking at a longer timline to develop, then I'd look at perl and php. I think mod_perl is a great environment for building large complex web apps. I think php is great for doing highly user based stuff. The way php files are written/executed though, I'm not a large fan of it for "large" sites in regards to the number of pages one can navigate to. If you have lets say 10-20 possible page views/page types, I think php works well at even very high volume use. Right now I'm working on a project that has many many many variations on pagetypes, and I dont think it would have worked well on php at all. In oop mod_perl though, it is very natural and nice.