I've worked in a company where we had to do time budgets for jobs. Our general rule of thumb was writing typical code, from scratch, in perl was about 2.5 times more efficient. That was normal code, and basic HTML fluff.

For every major API you have to interact with, CPAN vs Java stuff, add another factor of 2.

So for the typical example of working with 1. A database API, and 2. Filesystem search/modify/replace, you get 2.5 x 2 x 2 == about 10 times faster. A Java guru I work with agrees with these figures. I've written automation systems in about a month, and then waited 18 months for an ( admittedly better ) Java version to replace it.

With respect to CGI, remember the process creation/teardown is only relavent above about 1-2 hits per second per CPU. Below that rate, it hardly matters.

Also, CGI applications have zero resource usage when not in use. I'm not a Java person, but from memory most of the speed from Java comes from having a permanently running VM, kinda like mod_perl. I used to work for Cisco, and on their big main worldwide E10000 intranet, they had thousands of perl scripts. They could do this because each script wasn't using up permanent resources.

Cisco later switched to Java corporation wide, with "ALL NEW APPLICATIONS IN JAVA!". They filled up a dedicated E10000 in less than 2 months just from NEW apps, because they could no longer add all the VMs required by all these apps.

Hope some of this helps

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