Oh my. Funny story. Kerry and I (the Wordfence founders) met at eToys dot com back in the day and she’s now my wife of 20 years. Anyway at eToys she ran the web QA team and I ran the warehouse management system in Europe. At eToys we had over 200 front end servers (for the memory needed for the number of concurrent processes needed to support the number of connections) and later that increased IIRC. We got together and started a string of startups. Feedjit was one of them and it would get over 1 billion modperl hits in a month on over 1M websites. We scaled it up with just rhe two of us with 6 servers using modperl with Apache on the back end and Igor released nginx just as we hit exponential growth removing our need to scale horizontally. Suddenly we could have a single front end box with nginx, reenable keepalive, and I had 150,000 concurrent tcp connections hanging off a single Linux box thanks to nginx and epoll in the Linux kernel. Massive game changer. The power of event based design vs threaded or multi process design.

Not absurd. Sometimes stair steps in tech do happen. And they will in AI.