This is the first step to boost your drupal site (or any other aplications using PHP). More ways to improve your site are to come.

APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is a PHP extension that will boost up your php scripts. It is part of PECL (a repository for PHP Extensions)

1. In my ubuntu server "make" was not installed and you will need it to compile the code of the uploadprogress pecl extension. apt-get install make
2. Next we need "phpize" which will compile the code to make it part of the php library. apt-get install php5-dev
3. The next line will download and compile the pecl extension.