Partials vs. Helpers

Rails
1

I have several partials containing dynamic codes (already memcached all
the fragments as best I could), which I reuse ( render :partial =>
“stuff.rhtml” ) a lot within a single action call. For example, I have a
partial which defines how an entry is to be formated in HTML. I have 40
entries on a page, so the partial is rendered 40 times in a single
action.

Not knowing the innerworking of Rails, I have several questions.

  1. Within that single action call, is the file _stuff.rhtml read from
    the file system just once or 40 times?

  2. Does the file _stuff.rhtml gets compiled or cached somewhere? I am
    asking this because when I play with DRYML, it seems that its
    equivalence of partials get cached somehow.

  3. If _stuff.rhtml read from file system 40 times in the action call,
    should I rather convert this into a helper? Since, helper is cached?

Thanks!