I am not serving static content, so this reply is absolutely irrelevant.

On top of this, you can do the same with docker run nginx -v.:/var/www (which btw is a similar number of symbols). Also python’s http module barely supports anything but the most basic content-types (so good luck with eg SVGs).

At a few more orders of magnitude of memory use, sure.

Tradeoffs everywhere, which make sense or not depending on your requirements.

But Python's ref counting isn't a significant factor in its memory use.

>> At a few more orders of magnitude of memory use, sure.

Are you implying nginx uses more memory than a python interpreter? :)

Even just loading the base Python interpreter uses more memory than heavenlyblue's entire server.

  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  root     23612  1.2  1.7  62412 17492 pts/1    S+   12:38   0:00  |       \_ python3 -m http.server

Reference counting is a form of garbage collection.

Sure, if you want to be pedantic, but the context was limited memory use, and ref counting does not increase the memory used for unreferenced objects (except in cycles) unlike most other garbage collection algorithms.