I seriously doubt that the static content performance of NGinx (or whatever) has anything to do with performance issues. They're probably spending more money on

I seriously doubt that the static content performance of NGinx (or whatever) has anything to do with performance issues. They're probably spending more money on bandwidth than they need to, and offer a slightly degraded user experience, especially for people on slower connections, but otherwise... Things may have changed since October 1st, but on second page load of the home-page, I'm seeing the majority of content as either cached or served by CDN, a relatively small functional payload compared to a lot of HN darlings, and an 79ms latency for the main request. None of that is really alarming IMO. Even so, half these assets are trackers and 3rd party resources that would probably be CDNed externally. If storage IO and bandwidth isn't your limit (and internally the URLs could easily be routed to different servers entirely as well as caching proxies), then it's pretty plausible that there's practically nil overall performance impact as far as service availability goes. Also, I think the whole "you should only use one of each type of asset" philosophy is debatable at least.