[]Astaran said:
Caching will not work, cause the posts table gets changed all the time. [/]
It may not work on the posts table, but it will help on a lot of other tables, and if you run any other php/mysql scripts on your site it would help with them as well.
Turning off full new post tracking on the front page is inevitable once you reach a certain popularity (unless you have wads of cash to throw into hardware).