(Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com): A suggestion for caching: the home page, [[Main Page]], never should include links to nonexistent pages. Could that be cached (in standard stylesheet), e.g., as /index.html? I would think that page is accessed very frequently and that caching it would save some database work for other pages. When the page is edited (only by a sysop), he/she would render the page to HTML, possibly by explicitly accessing /wiki/Main_Page, and save it as /index.html. Would this help some server strain?
Could we also cache other pages known to link only to existing pages, such as this week in dates ([[April 30]], etc.), [[Current events]], and [[Recent deaths]]? Or are these pages updated too often to be useful? Could we also cache the protected pages?
It might be possible to either (1) have Apache look for our cookies, and if it determines that this is a non-logged-in user, serve a static front page instead of going through the script; or (2) have the "/" url itself be a small and fast script that checks the cookies and redirects to either the large script or the static page.