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Comment by metajack | Hacker News Reader

Many blogs are completely dynamic and grab content out of a database on every request. The static site generation style fell out of early fashion when wordpress took over from moveable type, and didn't really return much until jekyll. Even today I think most blogs you see are mostly dynamic with the platforms using caching to avoid hitting the database every time.

Most people don't do performance tuning of their blogs because the average traffic is miniscule. This means that any configuration issues rear their heads when load happens. For example, having your max connections to the web server be far more than the database can support. Perhaps the machine could handle the load if properly configured, but no one did so because there was no need.

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Don’t forget - at the time, even if you were pulling a static file, you were pulling it from disk. And disk was much slower… IDE was still common. If you had a good server, it could have been SCSI, but a white label Linux box could be quite slow. So, unless you had a good caching setup, you could still have issues sending even static data.

Also, when slashdotting was common, networks weren’t always the most robust. It wasn’t uncommon in the late 90’s for companies to have a single a T1 line for access to the internet. So, unless you had a good, well peered network provider, that was another potential bottleneck.

We worked with what we had. Thankfully, everything is more robust now.

This is very true. A lot of corpsites of SaaS and similar companies run wordpress - i think because it's easy to find a "web developer" who can build very impressive custom themes that you wouldn't even know are blogs. My last company was paying about $500 a month to various "Professional Wordpress Hosting" companies to host their .com -- and they all had spotty downtime records because they were serving everything dynamically. My strategy to fix these has always been to install a "static site generation" plugin, stick the wordpress instance itself on a cheap host behind an IP restriction, and have the site generator plugin publish the site (on every change, which is never even that often) to some static hosting (S3, etc). Saves 99% of the cost and makes the site 50x faster and able to handle infinite traffic. But most companies don't seem to do this, and individual blogs are even less likely to.

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