It was definitely a software problem. Small Perl app would take few tens of MBs max back then (and now). Also Perl FCGI existed much earlier than 2000 (looking

It was definitely a software problem. Small Perl app would take few tens of MBs max back then (and now). Also Perl FCGI existed much earlier than 2000 (looking at CPAN ~'96-97 appear to be first versions), althought obviously the code would be bit more complex than just "dump html on stdout"