Boost

The Boost module is often a great help with speeding up web sites of small to medium size and/or hosted on shared hosts.

It works by writing the entire cached page to a disk file, and serving it entirely from the web server, bypassing PHP and MySQL entirely.

This works well in most cases, but we have observed a few cases where boost itself becomes a bottleneck.

One example was when 2bits.com were called to investigate and solve a problem for a Fortune 500 company's Drupal web site.