Originally Posted by u-Bob

You are probably referring to perl cgi. PHP has the same 'limp dick' problems if you use it via the traditional cgi way. If you want to compare apples with apples then you have to compare mod_perl with mod_php and perl cgi with php cgi. If you compare mod_perl with mod_php you'll not only notice that mod_perl is faster than mod_php, it's also a lot more powerful. Mod_perl lets you to directly use all of the apache API in perl. PHP (mod_php) only allows you to control the content (response) phase of the Apache server.

When you request a page from an Apache webserver, the request goes through several processing phases (authentication, logging,... the response phase). The response phase is what you work with when building a perl cgi script or a php script. It is the part of the process that generates the actual HTML page and returns it to the browser. Mod_perl gives you the ability to replace the default behaviors of any of these processing phases with your own phase handlers.