APC (php accelerator). What situations should I use this?

Solution 1:

Your database queries are fast now. But do they scale? Have you tried adding a realistic amount of real-world data and then trying again? Does that one query work great with 8 members but horribly with 400,000 members?

Whether to cache or not is completely application and situation specific. If you expect load to grow by a lot and your bottleneck is CPU then caching will help you, if on the other hand your bottleneck is RAM and you're using swap then it's going to hurt you.

I'm not really doing the whole to cache or not to cache discussion justice, but that's the very basic question you need to ask yourself.