I have a site with about 150K pages in its sitemap. I'm using the sitemap index generator to make the sitemaps, but really, I need a way of caching it, because building the 150 sitemaps of 1,000 links each is brutal on my server.[1]

I COULD cache each of these sitemap pages with memcached, which is what I'm using elsewhere on the site...however, this is so many sitemaps that it would completely fill memcached....so that doesn't work.

What I think I need is a way to use the database as the cache for these, and to only generate them when there are changes to them (which as a result of the sitemap index means only changing the latest couple of sitemap pages, since the rest are always the same.)[2] But, as near as I can tell, I can only use one cache backend with django.

How can I have these sitemaps ready for when Google comes-a-crawlin' without killing my database or memcached?

Any thoughts?

[1] I've limited it to 1,000 links per sitemap page because generating the max, 50,000 links, just wasn't happening.

[2] for example, if I have sitemap.xml?page=1, page=2...sitemap.xml?page=50, I only really need to change sitemap.xml?page=50 until it is full with 1,000 links, then I can it pretty much forever, and focus on page 51 until it's full, cache it forever, etc.