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Static content faster than dynamic content - YouTube at 11!

I guess the real story here is that many people have become so accustomed to using dynamic techniques (with the added benefit of no caching whatsoever) and/or the world's slowest Web server software to serve essentially static content, that they don't even see the overhead.

Although I wonder, what exactly is static content? I seem to remember the YouTubers having a problem with serving thumbnails. Finding a file on the file system and serving it is also a "dynamic action" in a way, or isn't it?

He talks about it in his latest post: http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-01-04.html

nginx also deserves credit, it's an amazing little webserver

I used to use my own static web generator following a similar approach (template + content). It was some kind of html preprocessor and it was very useful for generating a static site with menus, skin, etc... I think it was a mistake never to publish it somewhere, as it was very nice at least for my own needs.

Wasn't "webgen" an early name for Viaweb?

Yeah, isn't this what they wanted to call their project at the outset?

It was: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html

Webgen - How Zed Shaw managed to be slashdotted/reddited/yc.newsed and survive