So, one of the big things with static file serving is that it requires an entire Drupal bootstrap, which sucks up a lot of system resources. We have work to do in Drupal/the File API to support some interesting scalability options, remote files, etc. etc. But, I think there are some interesting models for doing highly scalable static file serving outside of Drupal (and Amazon's S3 is cool).

So, one of the big things with static file serving is that it requires an entire Drupal bootstrap, which sucks up a lot of system resources. We have work to do in Drupal/the File API to support some interesting scalability options, remote files, etc. etc. But, I think there are some interesting models for doing highly scalable static file serving outside of Drupal (and Amazon's S3 is cool).