Buffers reuse in chunked filter. There were 2 buffers allocated on each buffer chain sent through chunked filter (one buffer for chunk size, another one for trailing CRLF, about 120 bytes in total on 32-bit platforms). This resulted in large memory consumption with long-lived requests sending many buffer chains. Usual example of problematic scenario is streaming though proxy with proxy_buffering set to off. Introduced buffers reuse reduces memory consumption in the above problematic scenario. See here for initial report: http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2010-April/019814.html