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I don't really agree with your definition of static. Wikipedia has no request time processing on their pages. If you request the english version of the hacker n

I don't really agree with your definition of static. Wikipedia has no request time processing on their pages. If you request the english version of the hacker news article it'll just grab the HTML from ram and send it over. Of course there's an api for posting edits, but that's as simple as updating a few rows in a database, and only happens once, when the edit it posted.

bawolff 4y ago
In the ideal case yes - and a significant portion of requests fall into that case (varnish cache), but its also the cheapest case by far. Wikipedia gets edited a lot, and a single edit can often affect many pages (in extreme cases, millions of pages). Keeping up with content churn is where a lot of the computational resources are directed. Now sure, this is still a lot easier than if every page view had to be rendered on demand dynamically. However a truly static site where things don't change at all is trivial compared to wikipedia to host.