Re: Starting a node program so it keeps running without interactive jobs staying open.

I am a little curious about using Apache as a front-end (same as reverse
proxy?)

Regarding your performance question, the CPU time consumed for our Apache
reverse proxy is running at approximately 30% of that consumed by the HTTP
server instances which we use for "applications".

Most of our "application" I/O requests consume less than 2 milliseconds. So
the reverse proxy instance may add less than 1 millisecond of CPU time per
request, most of which is probably due to SSL encryption performed in the
reverse proxy.

Reverse proxies enable us to set up separate HTTP environments for separate
customers and route traffic to appropriate "environments" based on names.
Reverse proxies are a solution for auditor's concerns about "opening" one's
database server to the Internet.

I haven't played with Node.Js environments yet. But most references suggest
having separate Node.JS HTTP instances for each "application". So a reverse
proxy could be used for that type of routing.