Is dsandler.org faster for you? Let me know.
I spent about an hour and implemented a pagecache for the front page. The first visitor to see fresh content will incur the usual page load time, including loading all 1600 entry files off disk, stat() and sorting them, and generating the output HTML.
Every subsequent visitor will see the same page, loaded from MySQL as a complete chunk. Every subsequent visitor, that is, until I add a new entry, in which case the cache is flushed and we start all over again. It should be a lot faster for most readers, and much less punishing to my server’s filesystem.
Variations on the front page (such as the previous N entries) should not be cached, and will be slow as usual. (If you see caching breakage—that is, stale content where you expect something else—please report the bug.)
