Arlo-
Boost is dead simple, really, just caching out everything that has a path alias defined for it, adding some mod_rewrite magic to the .htaccess file (where it also ensures, via the presence of a cookie, that logged in users don't get served a cached page), and tying it all up into a nice Ajax-based admin interface to manage the cache. Cached pages go into a directory cache/hostname.com/... under the Drupal installation, so the module is multi-site compatible (with certain reservations).
Interesting. We're just about to launch a very large site that uses a Generator module that I wrote that does n=much the same thing. In this case, we serve the cached page to all users and use a JavaScript dashboard to handle user customization. We flatten taxonomy pages, the front page, and generic 'site help' type content that doesn't require customization. Our system runs on Cron, but site editors can output individual pages or batches of pages on demand. One question; how do you handle pagination requests? In my case, I output each page as a .php file that includes a little check at the top. It looks for $_GET variables in the URL (typically Drupal's from=). If present, we use HTTP Header redirects to send users to the dynamic page. I'm also a little curious how you're flattening the pages. In my case, I send a Curl request to www.example.com/index.php?q=path/to/file that transforms into an fopen/fwrite at /path/to/file/index.php More details here http://ken.therickards.com/2006/06/04/tech-notes/ (item #1 under the 'new stuff' header). -- Ken Rickard agentrickard @drupal @gmail.com