You might be surprised in some cases.... We recently did some tsung testing on an optimization system we've developed (purposely general here). Running it the

You might be surprised in some cases.... We recently did some tsung testing on an optimization system we've developed (purposely general here). Running it the developers workstation w/ APC and Memcache and local Percona MySQL, it maxed at 300 request/s. (It's just a workstation, remember). Anyway, there may be some observer effects here, but the profiler indicated that most the time was being spent on php functions and system calls. So we might be in the 1% you're describing. Or _maybe_ it's a more than 1% after all.