I am surprised by your this observation. I have been 100% honest in what I wrote above... Trust me I know what I am doing. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that

I am surprised by your this observation. I have been 100% honest in what I wrote above... Trust me I know what I am doing. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you weren't being honest or that you didn't know what you were doing. I'm sure we've all had to deal with "Well, this guy on HN converted to X from Y and saw <insert generic gains claims here>, so why are we on Y again?", which the somewhat hand-wavy details in your original comment can end up contributing to (obviously we're limited for space and attention here, so leaving out some details can be desirable). What I failed at was communicating that my comments were not intended as an attack on your specific methodologies or choices, but was more meant to make the reader of our comments consider the wider implications of blindly following the herd and not making informed decisions. I have had people forward me lists of links to isolated, comment-less HN comments as "support" for their position. But I very clearly remember seeing all the Apache child procs bloating to 25 Mb after the first hit to the PHP code was done. So I am actually saving by externalizing on the resources. Yes, sorry, I didn't consider the exact traffic ratios between the (proxied) Java requests and the (internally handled) PHP requests. If you've got a wide spread there favoring proxied requests, then, as you've experienced, it would be advantageous to get rid of the internal handling, proxy all requests, and outsource the bloating to other processes/systems where it is more isolated, and the upper bound on the bloat be more influenced by the lower total requests for the resources that consume more. And once that's done (the getting rid of the monolithic parts) then it's a lot easier to experiment with replacing the different parts to see if there are other gains. You may have seen similar resource consumption benefits by nginx proxying to Apache+mod_php or even to bare PHP cgi. But one shouldn't even follow that method blindly either, because it's all based on workload, and everyone's workload is different. There are so system management and monitoring benefits and drawbacks that go with these kinds of changes. We both know that there is no software selection silver bullet, but it's not necessarily the readers of these comments that know that.