Perl may have had a better runtime, but PHP was effectively faster since it had an easy to use apache module and most perl code was being run as cgi scripts, which is hardly performant. I remember trying to configure mod perl and mason circa 2002, and it was an excercise in poor documentation and pain. PHP was dead simple to setup. That said I still stuck with Perl (eventually moving to Ruby), and I loathe PHP.
But, in general, running app code in the webserver is a bad idea. This is why everyone uses fastcgi in production, and why every web framework (except PHP) ships a standalone dev server for development work.
PHP is the one that's hard to use now, unless you are developing on an already-configured system.
