Many highly personalized pages don't have security or admin bits--e.g., when reading an article, it differs based on whether you've favorited it, are the author

Many highly personalized pages don't have security or admin bits--e.g., when reading an article, it differs based on whether you've favorited it, are the author, etc. Sometimes there are admin bits but they're trivial--a link to delete content, but this link is secured using authorization during the write operation. Pagecaching can hit 4000 reqs per second on commodity hardware--it's way better than the best you can get with db caching (100 reqs per second if you're an optimization god). Finally, pagecaching individual pages per user is mostly useless since your cache hit ratio is so low (i.e., it takes very little load off your Rails app). Pagecaching does not kill the point of Rails--Rails is about getting apps done quickly and beautifully. You still use Rails to render pages, and you still use Rails to do all write operations. Caching just means rails doesn't have to constantly recompute data that doesn't change! (disclosure: I'm the author)