really dumb ssi question

[venturi]

I can only hazard a guess as I don't have access to a datacenter and servers to run a benchmark test ...

PHP *generally speaking* is less resource intensive than Perl as it is usually configured to run under apache, however I would hazard a guess that having ALL .html files parsed for PHP would be as intensive as having apache parse all .html for SSI.

My current primary host has apache set up to parse .html for PHP but that's not common - he also has some damned fast servers so I wouldn't use my experiences as any kind of comparison.

I guess I'd have to say if I was backed into a corner on this issue would be that if only 10% of my pages required PHP I'd either:

1) convert those pages to .php, or
2) use IFRAME code to include the PHP code where needed.

There probably is a more eloquent answer/solution but those are the ways I have dealt with this in the past.