title: Is it possible to get a <200ms response with Drupal (without caching)?
body: <p>The question, simply put, is the one in the title. Is it possible?</p>
  
  <p>So far, my experience with scripting languages is that, to increase performance, you need to cache everything and later just serve the generated HTML files. </p>
  
  <p>That's ok for some use cases, but when you really need to generate a new page in realtime, it's just impossible.</p>
  
  <p>Drupal can take up to 3 seconds (or more!) to render some web pages (PHP execution time, not DB). That's crazy. Completely crazy.</p>
  
  <p>If many projects (like Facebook) are using PHP, obviously the problem is mine. But googling for this problem shows that it's common. Too common.</p>
  
  <p>(Of course I installed APC for PHP. It certainly helps, but PHP is still ultra-slow).</p>
  
  <p>Must I assume this is the reality for Drupal / PHP?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>