There is definitely a single right consensus on how to do high performance TLS load balancing (irrelevant of the software): - Create 1 process per core and pin

There is definitely a single right consensus on how to do high performance TLS load balancing (irrelevant of the software): - Create 1 process per core and pin to a core. - In extreme cases, pin the NIC interrupt to a dedicated core. (If you have multiple NIC, one dedicated core per NIC). HAProxy lets you do that very easily. That's why it's configured the way it's configured, because it's the options you need to make a high performance load balancer. Shared memory is not necessarily and would kill the performances dramatically. The "inconsistencies" you might have heard about mean that the stats in the stats page are approximate, nothing important.