[KirinDave]

It is definitely a bottleneck I face daily in designing crowdflower. Our EC2 bill is much higher than it could be because we have to rely so much on process-level forking.

A great example of this is resque. It'd be great if we could have multiple resque workers per process per job type. This would save a ton of resources and greatly improve processing for very expensive classes of jobs. It's a very real-world consideration. But instead, because our architecture follows this "share nothing in my code, pass that buck to someone else" model like a religion, we waste a lot of computing resources and lose opportunities for better reliability.

What I find most confusing about this argument is that I challenge you to find me a website written in your share nothing architecture that, at the end of the day, isn't basically a bunch of CRUD and UX chrome around a big system that does in-process parallelism for performance and consistency considerations. Postgresql, MySQL, Zookeeper, Redis, Riak, DynamoDB ... all these things are where the actual heavy lifting gets done.

Given how pivotal these things are to modern websites, it's bizarre for you to suggest it is not something to consider.