Regarding the memcache module. I don't think it would help much with path aliases, but I think it should be in core, even if optional. With that module and aggressive caching, anonymous users can be served with no database queries at all, which is very good for high traffic web sites. Also, with a good caching mechanism developers are more likely to think about proper caching; now it looks like nobody cares. I believe
<a href="http://drupal.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">drupal.org</a> would be the first to benefit from that.<br><br>-- <br>hex, out.