What should i learns?

I am an optimization freak.
I've only used C and Assembly in my whole life (except the markup language HTML to make a silly webpage for myself.)
But now i have to design a website for someone i know, and i'll ask you anonymous, what should i learn?

Since i am an opt.freak i'd like my website to be ultra fast.
What should i use for a database? MySQL ? RoR ?
What is the fastest? PHP ? Perl or Ruby? something else? (coldfusion? lol)

in before haskell, lisp, forced indentation of the code, opera browser, too bad * is slow as fuck etc.

Power: Ruby >= Python > Perl >> PHP

I disagree a bit with this. I've used all of them, and Perl is easily the most powerful. It's just that it's also the most ugly.

What Ruby and Python have in their favour is that they're both powerful and a lot easier to use. A more accurate summary would probably be:

Speed: Python > Perl >> PHP > Ruby
Power: Perl > Ruby >= Python >> PHP
Ease: Ruby = Python >> Perl = PHP

The reason I rank PHP as equal to Perl for ease of use is that avoiding all the security risks in PHP is nontrivial.