Just for reference my company's software is all built with Perl 5 and runs great. Most of the execution time is within the database calls so there is no impact from using Perl over a marginally faster runtime like Python or Java.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, but the last realistic comparisons I did had Perl running quite a bit faster. For example comparing ack to grin, which are very similar projects in Perl and Python respectively...at the time, admittedly several years ago, ack was an order of magnitude faster than grin. I also wrote a few log parsers in both Perl and Python (at a time when I was working in a Python shop, so they preferred everything be done in Python). The Perl parsers were much faster than the Python variant, for exactly the same work (again, an order of magnitude difference). Perhaps this is just an example of Perl's domain of expertise...processing text is a big part of its origin story, and has always been a big part of what people use it for. Or, perhaps Python has made remarkable performance improvements in those intervening years. I haven't worked with Python in that time, so haven't followed development. Perl 5 has gotten faster in that time, too, though, so I'd be surprised if Python is dramatically faster for the same real world tasks.
What is fast is string handling and log mangling. Perl was created for that; everything else is bolted on.
And, you speak of numerics, which is a good example of Python's wheel house. When I worked in Python it was at Enthought (the company run by the folks who created Numeric, SciPy, and who sponsors a lot of scientific computing Python projects). Perl definitely doesn't have the numbers performance of a hybrid Python+Fortran or Python+C++ system, like you can build with Python, Numeric, SciPy, etc.
So, even back then, Python was (probably) faster than Perl in that category (Perl has science and bioinformatics libraries, which may have been comparable back then, but certainly aren't now), and I guess it's unfair to compare Perl's strength to Python's weakness, and vice versa.
Nonetheless, I suspect Perl is not slower than Python in the general case. One would probably have to talk about specific tasks and implementations to figure it out.
perl6 has much more features than perl5, it's a completely different world. I wouldn't call that bloat.