Devservers in the lab use an apache front end. Everyone I spoke too thought Apache was serving the files in /static.

It turns out that apache is configured as a reverse proxy for CherryPy, and serves no content directly at all.

CherryPy is also directly accessable from anywhere without going through Apache, though no servers in the lab are doing this on a regular basis. This port should probably be restricted to local access to ensure that all traffic does through the expected connection.

Apache would be more efficient at serving the static files, but this may not be enough of an improvement to matter.