Serving dynamic vs static pages

Imagine you have a site which serves tables of data (let’s say a hundred rows generated with two or three tables). Is it better to always parse dynamic pages (you know that the latest version will be displayed) or is it better to generate an html page out of the data and change that file every n minutes ?

I know at root level apache has some cache functionality but I’m wondering if any of you have had any experience with that sort of thing or have read an interesting article about it.

I know it depends on traffic but I’m curious and want to code clean code, and it might save me hours of benchmarking.

thanks fellow kirupians

mlk