Is language really irrelevant to CGI performance on a typical webserver?

1. Hello World.
2. Print a list of 500 random numbers.
3. Read in and reverse a file.

Just a side-note: I would stop for a moment and think of how relevant those tasks (and hence benchmarks) are for the overall performance of a typical webserver. nferraz writes in The problem with premature optimization...:

you could make it instantaneously-fast, or even remove it, and it wouldn't have a significant impact on the global performance at all.

I'm not saying the choice of language is irrelevant to CGI performance. I'm just saying that unless CGI performance is a bottleneck on a webserver, there are few (if any) reasons to optimize it. It all comes down to profiling where your application spends most of its time, and work on those specific areas.