Hey, Just my 2 cents opinion wise.

We use Static Pages with includes for that.
Far too many times a CGI process gets messed up.

In your case (100% dynamic pages), there no longer is a site.
One trick to alleviate some of that is by using cron to automate queries and then save the results for includes.
That way, the queries are 3-5 minutes behind only.

For commercial, money making sites, they should not take that chance if at all possible.
On the other hand, if they are huge sites, the budget should give a greater amount of protection from crashing a dynamic site.

Fully dynamic sites also give more possibilities for hacking.

I've seen it myself on your sites. With includes running queries at least 80% of the page will be fine.

And our servers are fast enough: Dual 2.8GHZ, 2GB RAM, 15,000 RPM 73GB Drives in RAID, UNIX OS, and static is faster as we do quite a bit of MYSQL lookups when the index page loads.