@phpdeveloper.org
Many PHP developers, myself included often mention that using PHP that is compiled statically (Apache module) is much (18-30 percent) faster then the shared module that is normally compiled. This is a rather unusual claim that is often met with much skepticism for a good reason, presense of pic code resulting from a shared build should not cause this, however benchmarks speaks for themselves.
Unfortunately finding hard data is rather hard since most of us are rather lazy to spend 30 mins performing the needed tests. Fortunately, George Schlossnagle published the benchmarks he conducted on the matter that conclusively demonstrate that the the static build is much faster.
The raw benchmark data can be found here...
Personally, I'm a big fan of the static method - I've never had much of a need to compile it any other way. There are die-hard "shared module" people out there, though, just waiting to make their case.
Which do you usually use in your installations?