It is very easy to fall into the trap of serving up everything dynamically. I did that a few projects back and had to do some major re-writing as the site became popular. From serving 100% of the site dynamically it i snow served about 95% statically. But all of the static pages are dynamically created.

When a user modifies their HTML which is only part of the page, I generate a new static page and store it. It reduces the load on the server drastically. I even have some calendars - instead of generating them each time they are called I generate a static one as an HTML fragment and include it in pseudo-static pages using HTML::Template. At midnight UTC each day I generate about 120 new static pages for the following day, it takes less than 10 seconds to do! The slowest part of the whole operation is replacing the actual files.

jdtoronto