I have a single server site thats pushing 200k unqiues per day, and the traffic doubles roughly every 40 days (for the last 5 months anyway).
I pretty much only plan to
Im use IPB 3.1.4 with APC it works justy two times faster then without it.
Requests per second: 43.46 [#/sec] (mean) Requests per second: 24.23 [#/sec] (mean)
Don't test IPB with memcached yet