Am I missing something - why not simply use Django's built in caching layer. For the sake of setting a one line decorator and one setting in settings.py you'd

Am I missing something - why not simply use Django's built in caching layer. For the sake of setting a one line decorator and one setting in settings.py you'd get all the benefits, and more reliability. Rather than manually generating the static versions of pages, the Django filesystem caching back-end does that for you. The overhead of Apache->mod_python is so low on modern hardware, that you are likely to saturate your network connection far more quickly than your CPU or disks.