As a follow up to an earlier article I posted about Drupal 6 performance, and please bear with my learning curve for a moment, I figured out by 'accident', and a lot of investigation, that it matters very much the order one uses when they 'generate content' with the devel module for benchmarking purposes. My previous tests were done incorrectly - I inadvertently created a bunch of nodes that weren't assigned to any terms or users and vice versa. The result of correcting this error means that a no-cache-enabled-baseline takes much longer to complete than when I had things setup incorrectly.
...happily, the point of this article isn't that I'm a total goof.
No, the good news out of this ordeal is that now when block-cache-disabled performance is compared to block-cache-enabled performance the results are MUCH more substantial than previously noted (and thus Drupal 6 is going to be that much faster than it's predecessor Drupal 5 for authenticated users):
2489.69 ms (request time for auth user, no-caching of any kind)
-878.09 ms (request time for auth user, block-caching on)
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1,611.6 (difference) / 2489.69 =
64.73% improvement w/ block cache on
