(I shouldn't have merged my two posts above... Now I can't split this conversation into a new topic.)
The only thing i can think of is a static template system or using mysql for non standard caching of pages. Which my forum blocks content is stored html and all for the sole purpose of echoing a record instead of processing a page.
There's no magical solution for static pages.
Or you could use Templeet (
http://templeet.org), I built Cynagames.com around it back in 2003 or 2004 (even made my own forum using it at the time). Of course I ended up replacing the forum with SMF, because in the end it's too hard to maintain static pages out of dynamic contents. You basically can't store anything personal, or you'd have to cache every single goddamn page for a few seconds -- that would kill the file system for close to no gains.
Obviously, Apache fares better at showing static pages, but it's only useful if you have a very slow server and/or many hits. Otherwise, you might as well use PHP. If you have so many hits that you'd need a server upgrade, you probably should upgrade it really.
As for improving performance in comparison with SMF, yes, Wedge is faster in some areas (apparent speed on page load, no more PHP4/MySQL3 support, optimized markup, and many other things.)
And slower in others, e.g. jQuery or object encapsulation (it's slower by a few percents).
Basically, we're making sure that it's faster where it matters, and that if it has to be slower, it's for the benefit of everyone (e.g. cleaner code. It will be especially apparent in our smcFunc replacement, new BBC system and a powerful CSS preprocessor written from scratch.)
It seems to be very fast, especially when i take out line breaks and other unnecesary characters, and mysql has built in memcaching along with memcached.
Just enable caching in SMF... Level 3 is the highest IIRC. It should cache so many things.
Like i say, i have no doubt ill be thuroughly impressed with yalls work. So hurry up with the beta already. :)
Tell that to SMF. As we said multiple times, we can't release a single byte of code to the public without SMF going BSD first.
Perhaps going public was our way of reminding everyone that if we're not releasing yet, it's not for lack of a releasable product.