Now that I’m paying attention, I see that Steve Kirks is looking at Radio Comments. I’ve got a bit of experience with Radio Comments and here are some of my thoughts:

• Maintain static count files. I suspect that the web server would do a bang up job if you just made it easy.
• By month. So sites with prolific comments don’t pull the lifetime comment count for each page view.

4 Aug: Pat Ritchey points out that there can be multiple months on a page. Since Radio knows what months are present on any page, it can simply include more than one month when appropriate. The extra get is simply the price of conserving bandwidth.