Boost
Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic. Boost is very easy to install and has been throughly tested on Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting. Apache is fully supported, with Nginx, Lighttpd and IIS 7 semi-supported. Boost will cache & gzip compress html, xml, ajax, css, & javascript. Boosts cache expiration logic is very advanced; it's fairly simple to have different cache lifetimes for different parts of your site. The built in crawler makes sure expired content is quickly regenerated for fast page loading. For shared hosting this is your best option in terms of improving performance.
If you opt to use Nginx, Boost is the best for high performance by about 5% in comparison to Varnish, Boost delivers 3.4k requests per second in a test: Nginx+Boost beats Varnish. In a second test Boost hits 4.1k requests per second a 9% improvement over the competition.
Install
This is an advanced module and takes some extra effort to get it working correctly. Boost requires cron & clean urls to be working; you will also have to edit your .htaccess and robots.txt files.
Quick Way: Fix all Boost errors & warnings on your status report page admin/reports/status
Detailed Way: Read the accompanying README.txt for installation and usage instructions.
Handbook Pages
Recommended modules, tips & tricks, testimonials and other useful information is available on the Boost Handbook Page
Credits
4.7 Originally developed by Arto Bendiken
5.x Port by Alexander I. Grafov.
5.x Developed & Maintained by no one at this time. #454652: Looking for a co-maintainer - 5.x
6.x Port by Ben Lavender.
6.x Developed & Maintained by Mike Carper. I do accept Donations.
The following people currently have CVS access: Arto Bendiken, Moshe Weitzman, Barry Jaspan, Justin Miller, Ben Lavender, Josh Koenig, Ian Ward and Mike Carper.
Lists Of Other Caching Modules
http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897
http://drupal.org/node/326504
