[development] node caching

[Steve Rude]

> Robert says that we can already do this, with some effort. Those
> making really huge Drupal sites should really be prepared to put some
> effort in. Drupal will rarely fall out of my downloads folder and onto
> a production server. Save patches like these for D7 and move on.
>
> What was the compelling reason for this to go in post freeze?
>
>   
On the last project that I worked with Robert on, the advcache and 
memcache projects were used.  It was a very complex site, and thus the 
caching solution was fairly complex as far as that goes.  As Drupal 
becomes the standard for large dynamic media websites, any place that we 
can add performance is going to allow Drupal to be used by even more 
large complex sites and thus the entire project will continue to expand 
and get more large commercial companies funding the growth which is good 
for everyone.

If we have a technology like node caching that is only used on 3 major 
Drupal sites via patches, with each implementation custom or slightly 
different, it will certainly not be any more stable for Drupal 7 than it 
is now.  If we have hundreds or thousands of people who just have to 
click a radio button or add an option to settings.php to turn on node 
caching and label it as experimental, then we can begin to stabilize 
this great performance boosting technology.  If it doesn't work with 
your particular set of modules, fine, turn it off and no harm done.

I believe that since nodes are the crux of the Drupal system, releasing 
Drupal 6 without this technology is a real shame since there are so many 
great performance options that will be available for Drupal 6.

Steve Rude