[technion]

I agree. But on that final point, I have to say i hate setups where bots hitting thousands of non-existent addresses have every one of them going to a dynamic backed to produce a 404. A while back I made a rails setup that dumped routes to an nginx map of valid first level paths, but I haven't seen anyone else do that sort of thing.

[ductsurprise]

See Varnish Cache others... Or use a third party CDN that offers feature.

Lots of ways to configure them with route based behavior-in/validation.

[ilikepi]

I've been thinking about that exact problem and solution with the map module. On the off chance you see this, do you happen to have your solution published somewhere?