Any (Perl && PHP) users here?

I recently wrote one of my first Perl shell scripts to interface my DOS MUA with the Win9x mail gateway that I use. I then wrote the script in PHP. The Perl script smokes the PHP one by such a margin, that I'm here asking for your comments/suggestions. I must have done something wrong, but what I don't know. I'm running both these scripts on a 486-66 w/ 20M RAM. The Perl script is blazingly fast; the PHP one *very* sluggish. Both work as intended. Both scripts take the ascii output of PMail in the form of: Line1: $$ sender_email_address Line2: T recipient_email_address Line3: C cc_email address (if required) Blank line message body and writes two text files: msgxxx.wrk and msgxxx.txt. The former contains *only* the above $$/T/C fields re-formated; the latter *only* the message body. All quite simple really. However, like I said, the difference in performance is astonishing. I'm using Perl4 (works for me!) and PHP3.14. Tia... -duke Calgary,Alberta, Canada