Thanks for the thorough response. You make a good point about the rewrite rules, it does appear much harder. I like 15 minutes too.

I'll check out the static file route. I'm already running apache, fastcgi php, xcache, and mod_pagespeed.

Found some interesting things in this article.
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rules_intro.html

Won't you take me to Funkytown?