Fine. For your edification.

speedtest-cgi-minimal.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI::Minimal;
my $value = CGI::Minimal->new->param('a');
print "Status: 200 OK\015\012Content-Type: text/plain\015\012\015\012a
+ = $value\n";
[download]

speedtest-cgi-pm.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI;
my $value = CGI->new->param('a');
print "Status: 200 OK\015\012Content-Type: text/plain\015\012\015\012a
+ = $value\n";
[download]

I ran the test both with them hardlinked from the first @INC directory and then again with them in only their normal locations. The test was a 60 second run with 30 parallel fetches of http_load of each on a P4 with hyperthreading enabled at 3.06 GHz (I used a second fast machine to execute http_load for the requests). The version of Apache was 2.2.2 and the version of Perl was 5.8.8.

                 in first @INC Directory          Normal
CGI.pm (3.25)          21.5/second               21.5/second
CGI::Minimal (1.26)    73.8/second               73.6/second
[download]

The difference is below the system noise floor. Any other criticisms of my methodology?

My 'irrelevant' statement point was that it doesn't really matter a whole lot that if CGI.pm didn't do its clever little trick with subroutines stored in hash strings that it would be even slower than it is right now. It still is measured to run much slower than any of the alternative CGI parameter processing modules and that difference is simply due to its raw size.