Serving 200M requests per day with a CGI-bin

This was something that I've been suspecting for some time. We're moving towards complicated architecture while having possibility to use good ol' tech with newest CPUs.

I've been asked about architecture of a stocks ticker that would serve millions of clients to show them on their phone the current stock price. First thought was streams, Kafka, pubsub etc but then I came up with static files on a server.

I wonder how much would it cost though

AFAICT the latency of any non-trivial web API is determined by the latency of DB queries, ML model queries, and suchlike. The rest is trivial in comparison, even when using slow languages like Python.

If all you need is to return rarely-changing data, especially without wasting time on authorization, you can easily approach the limits of your NIC.