A quick stumble through the Language Shootout suggests using PHP instead of C might make you need, oh say 10 to 100 times as many servers. So there is room for improvement.<p>Of course if your workload is not dominated by script running CPU time then it doesn't really matter. Even then, until the cost for extra servers and their management exceeds the engineering cost to recode, add servers.<p><i>I get execution times of &#62;0.01 seconds</i> – hope you aren't planning to handle more than 50 transactions per second.<p>It all depends what kind of world you live in. I know people that use their hard disks for booting and loading caches and that's it. If one query in a hundred requires a seek they will not keep up. Most of the rest of us could happily fork a CGI PHP for each request and not notice.