What are your futuure intentions for the 32-bit servers.
I am currently running 2 instances of mongod – one a 64-bit instance for transactional data, and the other a 32-bit instance for our "archival" data. The archival data is quite large: several times the total memory capacity of the server, but is accessed pretty rarely (a typical record might get hit only 4 or 5 times per year).
Just as a matter of resource management, I want all available memory to go to the transactional server. The 32-bit server seems like a good solution for us, because it's memory usage caps out (under Windows) at somewhere around 2GB.
But I recently attended a 10gen presentation where I believe your representative said something about discontinuing support for 32-bit server releases (I'm not exactly sure, because the issue wasn't really on my radar at the time). But now it has become kind of important to me.
If you ARE discontinuing 32-bit releases, would it be possible to add s startup option allowing a memory allocation cap on a running server instance? What is the best approach for the kind of scenario (archival, logging, or other large, infrequently-accessed data stores)--are virtual machines the only other viable approach?