Perl is *SO MUCH* faster than Java on equivalent hardware with similar loads.
Heck, we use a Java Data Warehouse Reporting tool. It sucks.
We have made it into a "Presentation only" tool. We can do the same report data extraction with Perl and Shell on 6 year old hardware in 1/10th the time and passing fully populated short-term/temporary tables to the "tool" to render the "PDF" or "XLS" or what have you, than if the whole thing with was done almost brand new hardware withe the "tool".
Yes, its true, if you want faster clustered performance out of Java, just add more cores/processors and memory. But the point is, I can get nearly 90% more work done on older hardware not using Java.
No to mention, start-up loading times for Java *really* blow on new hardware. Worse than the time does for even the BIGGEST Perl programs we have on 6 year old hardware.
Its hard to believe that Intel and AMD doesn't praise Oracle (formerly Sun) for making Java such a pig!