This is too good (and short) not to quote in its entirety. Tim Bray on different strategies for making your blog faster:

Don Park makes his blog go fast by applying WhirlyCache to the DAO layer, slipping in a transaction layer to reduce database integrity corruption, and using aspect-oriented programming technology via the Spring framework, with the help of Java annotations to mark transactional methods and classes. Yow! My approach is to have Apache serve static data out of the filesystem. Whatever; faster is better.

My approach definitely tends toward the serve-static-files-with-Apache end of the spectrum.