1. You have too much talent to need forgiveness. However forgive me if appear to be lecturing. So Server Side We generally host on *nix where perl and PHP works well.Getting Perl to work well on Windows is not easy. On the server its only worth going to C or C++ with heavy compute bound stuff or groupware support. Solving graphs, generating visulizations, iterpolating images though the one I seem to be using most now is compiling from Bison/Yacc generated tools. Have built libraries for both PHP and Perl, Perl apparently has some advantage for now but the Zend team will fix that. Full suites do exist for VisualC, but the only member of my teams who have done well with it was a super Guru.Have used C++ Builder and its Dbase support for serving, C++ binding is quick and easy, but Delphi and Builder were built by the same guy who devised .Net so developing should be equally easy, though .Net is heavier and thus uses more server resources.Client Side Obviously there is no C++ or C on the client side in general web apps.However done many apps where the browser is used as a frontpanel for a local (or LAN local) application. There are many Open Source tiny servers which are very light.2. Benchmarks ASP books will say ASP is faster , Perl books, Perl faster , PHP etc. ASP.net is faster because it compiles. In general they are faster in some cases not in others. Most experienced users get their tools to meet application demands.Internet aps are normally cost driven by communication limits.Itranets aps can be performance bound.Nuff said. Had to refereee too many language wars. Do Not Quote me.Hope this was not much of a time waster.