One aspect to consider the nature of access to your data. Is your access dynamic or static? From your description I gather that it is static.

If your data is dynamic, then I can see dynamically generating pages as they are requested. Give the most up-to-date data possible and reduce maintenance costs. If a change from static to dynamic data is possible, go with dynamic.

OTOH, if you data is static (manually updated at scheduled intervals), I don't see the need to dynamically generate the pages on request. Instead, as you suggest, it would probably be better to generate static pages as a batch job when you update the data files. When using static data you can be assured of queries from anxious users wanting to know why their data doesn't appear on the pages. You can try to head some of them off by documenting the update intervals up front.

I don't know if is true for you, but if you have to make manual adjustments to your files (as a stop gap measure between updates) the ease/difficulty/feasibility of that process should be considered as well.

I believe that your most significant gains here are probably not going to be in terms of performance. Especially if the pages (static or dynamic) are basically the same in size although content may vary slightly. Rather, they will come from ease of maintenance. 

@a=split??,'just lose the ego and get involved!';
for(split??,'afqtw{|~'){print $a[ord($_)-97]}

In reply to Re: Dynamic Web Content- Efficiency by jlongino
in thread Dynamic Web Content- Efficiency by Superlman

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.