Well, taoofmac.com has 20+ years, 9000-odd pieces of content (that translate into 47.000 blob storage items), multiple navigation constructs (archives, backlinks - it’s a wiki - and even a 3D sitemap), and an incremental build for a post that links to 5-6 others (and resizes images, updates the home page, archives, linked page footers and backlinks) takes ~10s, including uploading the results (and an updated SQLite database) to Azure.
I use SQLite FTS for full-text search (it’s the only non-static endpoint).
A full site re-render on a Raspberry Pi takes 5 minutes, and a full reindexing - FTS plus linkmap - plus publishing around 10, but I only do that yearly or when I update things like CSS, layout, etc.
It all runs off a Git hook, uses SQLite to hold all the FTS, base HTML and metadata, and is as asynchronous as can be (including my own asyncio blob upload library). Costs me effectively zero.
I want to be able to hit edit on the post, do it right there, save and see my change immediately. I could set that up with a static site system but.... the admin I made for editing the post would remain the same. Furthermore the editor I have has a bind for CTRL+V that checks for images and automatically uploads them but also inserts an html tag for the media I just uploaded. This is something that is a terrible experience when editing a git repo having to manually link images and other media.
This doesn't provide a counterpoint to the original comment's point.
IMHO, it's true that a static site generator should be the way to go in 2023, instead of using a web framework with a db.
I am personally running a hugo blog, on netlify, with netlify CMS. I have 0 costs, great performances, everything needed out of the box. What else to ask for ?
In my blog, comments are not supported, and it would be easy to add if I developed my own blog with Django. But I feel that this single feature does not overweight the simplicity and velocity I have with such setup.
In regards to the requirement to know Git: It is just necessary in the setup phase, the blog posts creation and edition are controlled through Netlify CMS for me.
Plus tag pages, archive-by-date-pages, series pages and more.
I don't particularly want to have to wait for all of that to build!
It also offers faceted search against all of that, powered by PostgreSQL: https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=static%20site%20generato...