A common approach in between these two is to use something like memcached (or redis) to cache the results of common requests. That also tends to provide result

A common approach in between these two is to use something like memcached (or redis) to cache the results of common requests. That also tends to provide results faster than the database layer, so better latency and less database load. It's not as fast as serving static content via nginx or a CDN though. :)