I have my front page on my site heavily using database driven content. I would like to speed up this page as well as to reduce strain on my server.

What is the best way to do this?

Right now, I have a crontab execute every five minutes a PHP script that generates queries from my MySQL database all the content for the homepage, and to write the index page as a static file.

Is there a better way? Would executing a PERL script be more efficient? What about implementing some kind of caching feature on the page itself, or maybe MySQL has a built in way of handling this?

If there's a better way of accomplishing my goal I would love to here it, or if what I'm doing is sensible, I'd love to get confirmation. Thanks!