"Asynchronicity": checklist pattern

An interesting article about asynchronous building of page parts. Start off a checklist of parts (using, e.g. memcache), then time out at a given time, check the keys for parts that successfully got generated, and build your page with what you've got.

The point being that you end up with a much more resilient server - if a database is down for some reason, the rest of the page gets built and things degrade gracefully. Neat idea!