The Drupal community is notorious for producing excellent modules to meet specific needs without much more than a cursory acknowledgement of the interrelationship of other / complementary modules. This is no more apparent that with performance modules.

Different sites definitely call for different configurations and combinations or performance modules but there is a standard set that should be applied to virtually every production Drupal 7 site.

There is nothing worse than seeing a good site marred by poor performance.

Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal, Wordpress, Magento, and Joomla are database and PHP driven solutions which have a number of moving parts. If any one of these parts is not properly tuned, the entire site can feel the consequences. Understanding the performance impacts of server and site-level changes is crucial to keeping your site running at its peak -- enter benchmarking.