I use Ubuntu rather than SUSE but I have been pleased with PECL's APC (Alternative PHP Cache). I average about 250,000 hits daily and a couple gig of transfer per day and it seems to have worked flawlessly. I do notice some fragmentation but I have a cron job that restarts apache every week as it rotates the logs and that seems to clear things up and keep things running.
I'll throw my vote in for APC on Ubuntu as well. Apart from a small hicup with a bug in a previous version, it has run fine. We are lucky that our system is not at all "stressed", but I was impressed with PECL's install tools. Almost as nice as Ubuntu!
Eric
Take a look at this thread (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=56900) where a possible alternative to APC (Xcache) is discussed. Maybe one more for you to test.
When testing APC, a hint is to always set apc.stat=0 in your php.ini file - otherwise you'll get one or two blank pages 
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HTH!
Ken
Thanks, I will test these on my development systems. For testing, I am using VMWARE and just making a new copy VMWARE instance for each configuration so that one doesnt effect the other. I have seen some people recomend other PHP accelerators, but I have allot of faith your your advice.
Eric