The Fastest Web Language On The 'Net?

TheCorporal asks: "Our company has come to the point in our development where we feel it is time for a recode. We are rewriting code for a large multiplayer, browser/text, turn based strategy game (Like Utopia), and would like to know the best language solution in terms of speed. A Rapid development platform would be nice, but most important is the speed of execution." There's more below, but the question is simple, which language is the swift hare of the net, and which one is the toiling tortoise, and where do the others fall, in between.

"Basically, we are not experts in any one language, but have quite a bit C/C++/Perl experience. The target platform will be Apache on *nix, but a portable solution would be good. At the moment we have the engine coded in C for CGI which then interfaces with MySQL to store game data. We are thinking of hacking in FastCGI support for a good boost in speed, but we feel a complete recode will be neccesary, as the amount of players in the game will soon be hitting 5 figures."

"At this point we pretty much know CGI alone is out of the question from a speed standpoint, so we are looking for something a bit more robust. We have heard that mod_perl may be a good solution, but have also heard the same for Python, PHP, C++, etc, so if anyone has experience with dynamic content like this, and has some suggestions and comments as to the merits of your choice, we would appreciate it."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, slartiblartfast asks of his improbability computator, a similar question: "I have been wondering for a while if anyone has some really good metrics on the relative performance capabilities of the different scripting languages. By scripting languages I mean Perl, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, ASP etc and by performance I mean how many pages can each one serve per second for the same hardware and load test? Every benchmark I have seen was commissioned by the creators of the technology that eventually won the test. i.e. The guys implementing the technology that won just happened to be on the core development team for the product. Now I just can't swallow that sort of thing, so I thought I'd ask here. Has a truly independent test been done that didn't favour one technology over another, or that at least invited the best from each area to build and optimize the site to be tested?"

Careful. There are lies, damned lies, statistics...and then there's benchmarks. It's a quote that's been seen often enough, here on Slashdot, but it still has its own bit of wisdom to impart.