[kmike]

Originally Posted by imported_silkroad

Taking 43 hits per second off any server improves performance.

Just a quick note that 43 hits per second for a seldom changing and relatively small (a few hundred of megabytes in total) static content is nothing for the modern multiplexing web servers such as nginx or lighttpd. They are able to serve tens of thousands concurrent connections, effectively solving the C10K problem. This kind of load may pose a problem for Apache which isn't really suitable for the static content serving, but a few hundred hits per second for the static content residing in the OS cache (so there is no disk I/O) is peanuts for nginx.

Not trying to downplay your accomplishment, just pointing out there is another way to reduce server load - by switching to the more modern web server software.