To be short, no, use Lua, its not that difficult to convert to Lua (and make it non-blocking). There is a fastcgi shell for perl out there from 2002 which needs to be rewritten for todays demands, when thats done you can run perl just like php(cgi). Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,252707,252907#msg-252907