Benchmark of CGI/BASH, CGI/C, CGI/PERL and PHP on forking commands

've ran `ab -n 1000 -c 100 host/file` on several PHP, PERL and BASH scripts and a C binary which does the same job. ab is a benchmarking tool provided by apache project. The request per second results are as follows;

1) CGI/BASH 77 req/sec [View | Download] Source
2) CGI/PERL 70 req/sec [View | Download] Source
3) CGI/C 61 req/sec [View | Download] Source
4) PHP 59req/sec [View | Download] Source

Server hardware was one Athlon XP 1800+ with 512 DDR RAM with totally not tweaked Apache 2.0.55 on Gentoo. The req/sec for a static page varied from 1000 to 1300, just fyi.