>>22
Not much of a performance hit.
Believe me, it will be if your board becomes of decent size. The overhead you're getting isn't from your code but forking a new copy of Perl (or Python, or Ruby, or...). Think along the lines of Amdahl's Law with a large sequential constant.
If you insist on going this route, do yourself a favour and use FastCGI. Perl makes it dirt easy. You'll be hurting in short order otherwise.
>>26
As an aside about Perl, it's a beautiful language as long as you stick to a small subset and avoid the OO. You might be surprised at how easy it is to match Python for readability (really!).
Well, other than the parameter passing and list flattening, which you can't avoid. Ugh. :(