PHP long had decent performance, since version 4 iirc when it borrowed the bytecode approach from Perl and afterwards afaik was pretty much on par with it. Remember that even with FastCGI the vastly prevailing model of execution for PHP is to start the script just from the bytecode cache every time and destroy everything when it ends. Long-living async apps like with ReactPHP never became any kind of popular, and still PHP is likely the most popular serverside environment on the web (if only because of Wordpress).
Perl and PHP are both likely way better for personal productivity scripting than Python or Ruby, in terms of not waiting for them to get going already. Personally I would like it very much if Lua became as popular, though the absence of proper `null` is bothersome for data exchange.
If you're going to compare Perl with Ruby make it Perl + Moose then redo your benchmarks. Otherwise it's an apples to oranges comparison as Ruby has built-in OOP. Ruby was built on top of the best bits of Perl and with its blocks and metaprogramming it is arguably the most advanced scripting language. Python fails to match Perl and Ruby due to its half-assed lambdas.
