Best method to retrieve site settings

I uderstand what you are saying, getting a nice little asp file, include that on every page or on the header which itself will be included on every page, now that is fine, but this file will have to be read and processed everytime, as a user goes to the about page it reads and applies the config, then he goes to visit the contact page, the same happens, the user could be visiting hundreds of pages, and hunders of times this file has to be read and processed, not to mention the visited page itself, don't you think there's too much overhead there?

My server is set to use user HTTP compression that forces every dynamic page to be read and processed before it is sent out, due to the dynamic nature of the file, the same happens to all asp, shtml, ... by default, even with no HTTP compression, so the server will not be serving this config file from cache, and that's where the overhead will be coming from.

Say you have 100 asp pages, a user goes through all of them, the server will have to process 100 pages and generate HTML for all of them to send out, but hold on a second, you also have a config file included on all of them, so the server will have to process twice as much, 200 pages, when the user requested only 100 of them, that seams a heck of alot of overhead, there's got to be a better way.