Comment by yamtaddle

I think you'll find that most older, popular (or once-popular) languages perform better than you might think. Perl couldn't perform too badly or it'd have been unusable on 1990s hardware. Early webservers often had single cores clocked at sub-100Mhz, mid-tens megabytes of memory, and tiny, spinning rust hard drives—a bunch of modern web server stacks would struggle to run at all on that hardware, let alone to serve even tens of requests per minute.

Go look up some real-world-(ish) performance benchmarks for various web frameworks if you want a real surprise. You might find it'd be hard to sell any scripting language other than PHP(!!!) for a project, if performance actually matters and for some reason you can't use a compiled language. Don't assume the new thing is better, or faster, even if that's its reputation. It may not be entirely earned.