APC Strangeness

We use the APC opcode cache for PHP on all of our customer facing web servers and its a beautiful thing, it really speeds up serving PHP and since we have the RAM to burn might as well go for it. There is a bizarre thing about the optimization though, anything overly aggressive just causes it to bomb out. It could be that optimization is experimental but it would be nice if they could fix that. The docs don't specify a scale for optimization so I assume its a 100% scale and trying 50 as an option bombs out all over the place. Anybody else have experience with APC? Am I doing something dumb?