perl or php
 

What's faster, lol

Pretty sure PHP is and thats the reason most use it over perl. Perl is pretty powerful but never made it far for web.

Perl is still going strong..no PHP became popular because any idiot could use it to put together web scripts and the ability to mix html and code.... PHP was originally based on Perl.

There's lots of ways to use most Perl as plain old cgi or with mod_perl to get the performance you need.

Not to hate, but we're really talking about the speed of languages like PHP and Perl? If speed is a real concern, I don't think either would be a practical choice.

Or, to put it another way: I don't think I've ever heard someone say "Change that Perl project to PHP, we need SPEED here." .. or vice versa.

Ruby JRuby

PHP. Although it's limited and uses too much memory and it is slow compared to many other languages, slow to write and still immature. Also has been designed badly and broken from the inside out. For example multi-inheritance is unknown.

BUT! 5.4 is almost twice as fast as 5.3, it's JUST getting features it should have had. Many hosts still run 5.3 though.

How did you come to that conclusion? Last I checked it's a few % faster due to some optimizations, but it's not overly noticeable in most environments.

Well, zend framework runs a LOT faster. You can find countless benchmarks online, Wordpress runs about 10% faster and less memory footprint.