but there is very little reason for Java to ever bee quicker than Perl.

I guess with JIT compilation and smart optimizers you can get very good speed improvements, inline method calls and stuff like that. Since perl 5 has not JIT, many possible optimizations can't be made.

But I don't know which is actually faster in what cases. Maybe the Debian language shootout has some answers, but at the moment I'm too tired to interpret the results ;-)