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.