You apparently don't have any free time problems, either ;)

I would have to say that most often, "well written" compiled C++ is going to be faster than Perl... though things like mod_perl and fastcgi help level the playing field. What I would like to see is some solid benchmarking of the time to write a moderately complex cgi in C++ versus Perl. In my experience it will typically take at least three times as long to write the C++... at least. This is where the true savings come into play, since these days programmers (typically) cost more than hardware.