caching

What sort of performance increase would you expect to see by simply using Alternative PHP Cache (APC) and Drupal caching? APC is an extension that caches the compiled PHP bytecode hence avoiding the overhead of parsing and compiling source code for every single request.

The following benchmarks were performed using ApacheBench with 1000 requests (50 concurrently). The requests were sent to the frontpage of the site, which is quite intensive in terms of modules ( views // panels // custom modules etc)