[flukus]

Surely there's a CPU/disk trade off at some point. Static pages are much larger (less likely in memory) and would cause disk reads much sooner than the same files being generated dynamically. Of course wordpress isn't known for it's efficiency so the static page preference is probably quite high.

[grogenaut]

there is a big difference in the cost of static hosting and CDN (think Cloudfront / S3) for static stuff and running an active piece of hardware for static stuff that doesn't change. Like orders of magnitude. Sure for small sites it's not that much but it's still orders of magnitude.

also the answer to a large number of my interview questions ends up being figuring out how you can just effeciently serve the stuff from a CDN/Blob Storage. You can scale the crap out of this for quite cheap.

[tomnipotent]

If the final result is 500k of HTML, a dynamic website is doing a LOT more work to return that 500k than a static website. Assuming you get more traffic than you have pages/generated.

[robertlagrant]

> Surely there's a CPU/disk trade off at some point

At an extreme case, yes. Disk is SO CHEAP.

[flukus]

I was thinking more about the time cost. Disk is cheap but slow compared to memory.