> 
> 	The big cost with perl is startup. If you have a requirement
> 	well suited to perl's hashing datastructures and features its
> 	hard to significantly outperform running perl with running c
> 	without a lot of work.
it depends from what you name "lot of work"..
> 	Unless your program is trivial the selection of fastcgi over cgi
> 	is more significant than between c and perl.
yes... but with trivial program it's trivial to write it in C. especially
if you wrote lot of them before.
> 	The program in question is not that large (its an online fantasy
> 	system with everything pulled from a SQL database), but it has to
> 	dynamically process templates and languages in a way that would
> 	have made it uneconomic to write it in c.

i prefer "archaic" methods... :)