Archives as Flat Files: not a database hit, simply write out the content to flat files on the users system.
We went through 3 systems.
First one put everything in html and that's it. One directoryw ith all, and that outgrew itselve. We went to storing it in a database but that outgrew also. We are now in a mixed situation, the topics are seperate html files, with a database linking them.