While CGI scripts written in perl and shell script were all the rage, I remember using C (and ODBC) quite fondly and successfully. It wasn't until I encountered the webscr.cgi at PayPal that was more than a GB compiled and spanned millions of lines of C language that I realized the error of my ways.
No, that definitely happened. I wasn't there, but I'm pretty sure I've seen discussions from multiple companies about how they managed when their C based CGI/FCGI/HTTP+logic executable got too big to fit in 32-bit memory space; for some, amd64 came in time, for others, they had to split things out, or do terrible stuff with PAE. Adjusting the user/kernel address split was also common, IIRC.
