Alternatives of PHP ?

When I loaded GigaBytes of XMLs into mysql database with PHP script, I was thinking about PHP alternatives. Why do I need that ?
1. PHP is slow – I’m speaking about area of data processing and implementation of algorithms
2. No good cli debugger – I’m just tired of debugging with ‘echo’ and ‘var_dump’
3. Unpredictable memory consumption – it’s easy in processing of big files to eat all available memory
4. Need something new – I’ve been using PHP for almost 10 years, so I want to try something else to refresh my mind.

List of my requirements:
– Stable binding to MySQL, support of new protocol with prepared statement is necessary.
– good XML handling
– Fast in terms of performance and development
– multiplatform, at least Linux, Windows, Solaris necessary
– under active development and wide community
– web binding
– not Java (I don’t like it, as most PHP-guys, I believe)
– has something that impressive me

So I went to The Computer Language Shootout Benchmarks and walked through wide list of proposed languages: D, Ocaml, Haskell, Erlang, Python, Ruby, LISP, Scheme, Lua,
Eiffel, C#, SML, Perl, TCL and rest.
Unfortunately my first requirement of support MySQL narrows the list to Perl, Ruby, Java, C, C++, even Python supports only old mysql protocol (am I wrong here?).
Excluding Java (see my requirements) and C / C++ (I don’t consider them seriously from Web-development) I have: Perl and Ruby. One problem with these languages they work as fast as PHP if believe to Shootout Benchmarks, so I’m not sure I should replace PHP on Perl/Ruby.
However, taking into account increasing popularity of Ruby, maybe I’ll take a closer look at.

Speaking about impressive features I’d look at Ocaml & Haskell as functional languages.
Also I was enjoying of syntax of J and K languages, e.g. program to calculate count of words in file and quicksort algorithm: