Mike Fletcher <lemur1 (at) MINDSPRING.COM> exclaimed:

• Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1998 13:01:58 -0500

          At my former employer (Aaaahh . . . Sorry, just feels good
  to say that :), I rewrote a commercial interface to a defect tracking
  system.  The original product was a bunch of Bourne shell scripts
  that all sourced one humoungus configuration script.  It took on the
  order of 10-12 seconds to return some pages (and some of those weren't
  even excuting any queries against the defect database) on a mostly
  idle SS20.  Under mod_perl, that dropped to approximately 2-4 seconds
  for everything but really large queries (i.e. everything in the db).