Specifically, I was wondering if there are any performance benefits to compile apache2 from source in Ubuntu as opposed to installing via apt-get?
SnapOverflow
For any given one point in time you can probably beat a packaged release by small single-digit-percentages. However if you aren't committed to benchmarking and rebuilding each future release its only a matter of time before the Ubuntu build pulls ahead of you or fixes a bug/security-hole that you won't.
Consider the cost of you doing lets say quarterly benchmarks and builds (and rolling them out manually) vs. the cost of an extra 2% of hardware budget. Worth it? Assuming you make more than minimum wage and have less than 1000 servers, not likely.
Slight gains, but, not enough that it made much sense to repackage it for our data center. (running Debian, not Ubuntu) An autobuilder makes the task easier, but, we never really found it worth the effort.
I don't know about ubuntu's default but atleast when i was using 1.3 on rather large setup, the default MaxClients max value was 256. Our machines and net connection could handle alot more so tweaking some header files resulted as a much better performance since we could offer more concurrent connections. However, if you go this path, be prepared to tweak abit of network and filesystem options.