Question on MySQL performance

Designing an efficient web page

[runner]

I have two web sites that have a lot of database driven content (presently flat-file databases) I'm switching to MySQL soon. I wrote perl scripts using HTML::Template to generate the dynamic content and those perl scripts are called from Server Side Includes.

I don't know how much of a load this presents to the server. I'm trying to decide how to archetect this whole thing. The way it's set up now, every time a user access a page, the cgi scripts access the database and build the page.

I was thinking about setting it up so that the pages are build in advance only when the database is modified. That way the cgi scripts are only run when new data is entered in the database. The Server Side Includes would still be there but they would be including the pre-built page and would not have to access the database.

If MySQL does not put much of a load on the server then there's no reason to go to the trouble to be more efficient. My sites are local clubs and don't usually get national or international visits so volume would be considered low. I'm using one of the major hosting providers on a shared server.

Any thoughts?

[physics]

If the pages don't get too much traffic you're probably better off just having them by dynamic. But a cache function is a good idea if it's not too much trouble.