I personally cannot sustantiate it with benchmarks, even though most benchmarks do bear it out, but PHP is by far and away faster than Perl at most web stuff.
What's more important though, unless you want many, many hits, is your programmer time. PHP, for web pages, once again, is faster to code. It's a scripting language that is almost a RAD tool, since coding is so fast and simple. And that's saying alot, since Perl is definitely for quick-and-dirty coding.
It's also faster to debug and to remember what you where doing, if you come across an old script.
So, it's faster in many senses.
Be sure you are using PHP4, mod_php, the Zend Optimizer, and have optimized your web server, if you want fast. Fortunately, those are all set it and forget it options that work with speed up all of your code.
