Dynamic vs Static Builds

Hi, I've been working with a PHP for a few years now. I've always thought that on production servers, to have them working at peak efficiency, I should have the Apache and PHP compiled as a static build. I recently got into a debate with someone over whether this had any worthwhile savings. Can anyone tell me which is the best solution, or point me in the direction of a solution? I realise that it would vary from situation to situation, so I'll tell you that my situation is high load servers required to run as fast as possible. They get restarted once a day, and (ideally) only get php+apache rebuilt when there's new versions out. Thanks for any advice you can offer, John