[ntoshev]

Yup, I'm actively using this architecture, in Python, with gevent (so that calls to external services don't stall your web server). I spawn long running computations in separate processes. I've described it here:

http://www.underengineering.com/2014/05/22/DIY-NoSql/

It really achieves 10k simple requests/transactions per second on a single core (or a $5/month VPS). The software support for it might have been better though. I should really release some code that helps with things like executing a function in another process, or verifying that some code executes atomically.