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Yes, the pages viewable to guests certainly need to be cached as 90% of the visitors are guests including the search bots and we want to avoid the load on db especially from their browsing. I remember now that a few times my forum went down due to multiple connections was due to this search bots whom we don't want to stop . For example the PunBB forum presently has:

    Registered users online: 2
    Guests online: 28

So it is the guests including bots who need to view the cached pages more than anyone else. Please make this MOD if you can. It will a great help for us on shared hosts.

Yes, but it all builds when there are a lot of simultaneous visitors on the forum. PunBB forum pages load very fast so the visitors would browse many pages in a shorter time than other forums. So there is a chance that there may be many simultaneous database connections to the database at some point of time and that is enough for the shared host to suspend the account or for the forum to go down with errors.

As I pointed out above, I don't think a Php Cache gives exactly the same benefit as a fully static cache like WP Cache for example would because the forum pages will still execute queries to the database as per my knowledge. If that was the case, WordPress people would use only one of them at a time. But so many are using WP Cache in addition to a Php cache. I don't think it is a hassle to design such a MOD for PunBB. It will remove the hassles for those who want to run a higher volume PuBB forum on a shared host with that max db connections restriction.

I think this problem was only for a previous version of XCache and WP Cache. As far as I know, WP Cache has no reported problems with other PHP Caches.

I don't get you on this. WP Cache (which caches for reducing db load) works well with PHP Caches (which cache for reducing php load) and they both play very well together on the same shared hosting with an updated (not outdated) cache system when a post or comment is new or edited.

I am already on a paid shared hosting and that is what we are discussing about. Please read the above replies. The queries don't eat up the bandwidth. They eat up the RAM (mostly) and CPU of the shared server. I already said that paid shared hosts have a limit of 30 to 50 simultaneous database connections which is main problem. Many have faced this problem of "maximum database connections exceeded" with PunBB too on paid shared hosting. They are many topics about it on this forum. I guess one of the main purposes and advantages of designing PunBB was to make it run smoothly on a paid shared hosting also even for a high volume and visitor forum. I think that out of all popular forum scripts only PunBB is so lightweight, that it can faciltiate a high volume forum on a paid shared hosting. And with such a full static page PunBB MOD, it would allow a few thousands of simultaneous visitors on a paid shared hosting imho. Please remember than a shared hosting is less than $10 monthly while a reasonable VPS is around $50/month  and dedicated is much more. Thanks.

I understand. I don't think caching would load the server much. If it does, it will be easily offset by the great decrease in load after caching. Or one can switch off caching during high posting time. Basically the majority of visitors come to browse the forum. Only a small percentage will post. So the thousands of database queries from the visitors can be avoided with static html pages. Phpbb 3 has put in lot of work on caching. of course it is twice as slow as punbb.

Thanks MrMister. Can you please post the code for PunBB? I am not a programmer so I don't know how to use it for PunBB.

WP Cache does dynamically change only the WordPress new or edited posts or comments and again adds them to the cache. I don't know how it is done but you can refer to WP Cache plugin page. Normally there are no static html pages on the forum. Each page involves database queries.

Each viewtopic or viewforum page makes many queries to the database and most shared hosts have a limit of 30 or 50 maximum simultaneous database connections. Database queries also use server RAM and CPU which is also limited on a shared host. This makes it a maximum of maybe around 100 forum high browsing visitors to suspend our shared hosting account imho. Static html pages consume only pure bandwidth and hardly any RAM and CPU. When the shared host suspends our account due to exceeding the max database connections, it becomes an issue of the while forum not just one topic.

WP-Cache works for WP logged in users also. I don't see why not for logged in users also. I recommend for logged in users also and an option to switch it off for logged in users if possible. Because if you have 100-150 logged in users on PunBB, again the Shared hosting would start giving maximum connections exceeded error. So it needs to work for logged in users also. In WP Cache, admins even have a way to remove a specific post from the Wp Cache in the admin but that may be too advanced.