Good post; one comment/observation: if you have to go to the database to get a timestamp, and make a system call to get the file timestamp, that overhead may cancel out any gain from avoiding the sql select(s) required to build the page dynamically.

Other replies here made the case articulately for having the content be in the database and the page built dynamically.

There are lots of subtleties, exceptions, etc., but as a first appoximation, one sql statment will usually be at least as much of a performance hit as everything else you do to build a web page. A select to get one field (i.e., timestamp) from a row and fetching html from the file system is going to be as much of a hit as selecting the whole row (assuming your row isn't many kb) and building your page on-the-fly.

The sql performance hit for a keyed, single-row select is not based on band-width, but on the overhead of communicating with the sql engine. And it's probably an order of magnitude worse if you aren't maintaing db connections across page requests.