Benchmarking can tell the precision of the picture. In my opinion comparing timestamps would take much lesser time compared to generating the entire page from database.
Also if that becomes an issue,
'Thepen' nodes can be served with 'latest'-link which will point to the same node on perlmonks.
'perlmonks' nodes can be linked to 'thepen' if 'live' setting is off.
Now the live-feature turn on/off may be put on every page at the top instead of 'user settings' for easy accessibility. So user can choose the mode while visiting perlmonks. 'Live Off' mode will help to reduce the server load.
The benefit this scheme will provide is to link static pages from the dynamic site, which we all log-on to. Also whenever any interactivity required (voting, polling) we can easily swith to 'live mode'.
I can see that this idea has some similarity with 'emacs modes'.
artist