its more efficient and orderly to run a cron to write your cache (rather than rely on the next visitor). even if u are the ‘next’ visitor, hitting the page to write the cache is a wasted few seconds of life. even worse if the change affected several pages.

i also add a mail statement at the end of my cache writer that alerts me if the cache write fails. good way to catch problems early.

of course the ultimate speed gainer for a server is to turn off your db and use flat files. cut out the mysql querying and you save yourself huge overhead. mysql should only be used on sites with highly active data. why have mysql running if your data only changes daily or weekly?

if u use flat files then u dont need a cache. its the same server load to serve a flat file page as it is a cached page. its all files. :)