Nope, so, the goal here is to reduce how many machines (each with their own RAM limits) are used. The task is holding open bidirectional SSL wrapped long-lived websocket connections. They're held open for hours at a time, since we need to send notifications when we get them.

Every connection has a base cost of the TCP kernel send/recv buffer, which in our case we dropped a bit to 4kb each. So that's still 8kb per connection right there. If we terminate the SSL on a separate machine from where we handle the connection, then it means we'll be using 8kb more memory per connection. Probably even greater because nginx has its own send/recv buffers for data.

I'm sure our use-case is a unique one, most people care about raw through-put so the majority of SSL optimization has focused on lowering CPU use under high load rather than memory use under massive amounts of connections.