You have a PC in front of you.
Can you execute a PERL loop with a moderate mix of instructions in it?
The server is running at least 72,000 lines of PERL a second. I simply can't remember comparable numbers for other environments (It's been over 6 years and there were soooo many different numbers
).
At a guess PERL (if it is pretty efficient) is doing 10 or so machine instructions per line and 720,000 instructions per second seems like a light enough load if all we are looking at is the PERL cpu load.
There is a heck of a lot more than that going on though. I'm sure you're making a ton of op sys service calls in there and they can be at least of an order of magnitude more expensive.