I would love to see benchmarks against ruby 1.9.2. Perl always had comparable speed to ruby 1.8.6 with lower memory consumption and cpu usage. Now hopefully it'll be equivalent to ruby 1.9.2.
Perl 5.14, Dancer 1.3040, HTTP::Server::PSGI:
Requests per second: 856.48 [#/sec] (mean)
Memory after tests: 11296 (VSZ) 7632 (RSS)
Requests per second: 402.72 [#/sec] (mean)
Memory after tests: 20612 (VSZ) 10628 (RSS)
I'm also a fan of running quick string management tests to roughly benchmark interpreters at a given servers, since most of our codebase do a lot of string manip. Here's a 1MB mem alloc + cat test:
Ruby 1.9.2:
$ time ruby -e 'x=""; (1..999999).each { x << "a" }'
real 0m0.313s
user 0m0.277s
sys 0m0.026s
$ time perl -E '$x.="a" for 1..999999'
real 0m0.167s
user 0m0.139s
sys 0m0.020s
It just seems really silly ;-)
* perl5 was always a 2-4 times faster than than ruby 1.8
* perl5 & ruby 1.9 are comparable usually swapping places on different "Which programming languages are fastest?" benchmarks
* When taking in above speed benchmarks, memory used & code-used then perl5 just nudges in front of ruby 1.9. See "Which programming language is best?"