Yea, mod_perl isn't the same thing as writing your application in C, but anyway, my point was in reference to the parents comment:

"I would never ever release a new version of anything that is significantly slower than the previous one. It's simply a bug in my view."

I was trying to get across that we give some up performance for convenience now and again and it's fine to do so. I worked on the BBC iPlayer API which was written on mod_perl, by the way.