Startup time isn't a factor for any modern language for web serving.
Any site taking a reasonable load will move to having persistent application processes. With perl, this is normally achieved with Apache mod_perl or FastCGI. The application server processes are then either long-lived and standalone (FastCGI) or the code is linked into the web server (mod_perl).
I think (not sure) that perl led the way in this sort of persistence (as it led the way for CGI processing before that) but most languages used in any kind of performance-sensitive web serving environment these days would use this model (or a related model where the web server itself is written in the language in question too, allowing the application code to be even more simply embedded and persistent).
