Last year, I took two days to build a mostly static blog to replace WordPress. It pays off everytime there is a WordPress vulnerability I don't have to worry about, and everytime we post an interesting post and I don't have to worry about if WordPress is going to fall over (yes, maybe there's some caching thing we could have used). It pays off when I have multiple data centers running, because WordPress doesn't have the ability to read from a local MySQL slave, so perf on the datacenter far from the master is terrible (the i18n plugin we were using didn't help).
I imagine the payoff is similar for the stack overflow team as well.
EDIT: I don't understand why they are using disqus for comments, when they have a self hosted comment platform, in my case we don't accept comments.
Comments
Last year, I took two days to build a mostly static blog to replace WordPress. It pays off everytime there is a WordPress vulnerability I don't have to worry about, and everytime we post an interesting post and I don't have to worry about if WordPress is going to fall over (yes, maybe there's some caching thing we could have used). It pays off when I have multiple data centers running, because WordPress doesn't have the ability to read from a local MySQL slave, so perf on the datacenter far from the master is terrible (the i18n plugin we were using didn't help).
I imagine the payoff is similar for the stack overflow team as well.
EDIT: I don't understand why they are using disqus for comments, when they have a self hosted comment platform, in my case we don't accept comments.
Simple caching would have solved all of your issues. Classic case of not profiling before blaming the whole system.
Simple caching wouldn't have solved the (numerous) security issues.
You could still export/dump the WordPress pages as static html and still keep the editor. (and WordPress not accessible from the outside).