[Gluster-users] glusterfs on 32 bit - experiences?

[Tomasz Chmielewski]

I was wondering about general stability of glusterfs on 32 bit x86 Linux.

I have it running without problems on some lightly used 32 bit systems, 
but this scares me a bit if I decided to use it in production[1]:

	While the 3.x versions of Gluster will compile on 32bit systems
	we do not QA or test on 32-bit systems. We strongly suggest you
	do NOT run Gluster in a 32-bit environment.

I was wondering why this suggestion is so strong?

Is it because:

1) no QA was ever done,

2) there are some fundamental problems with glusterfs design on 32 bit 
systems,

3) it is because 32 bit glusterfs will crash with filesystems bigger 
than 16 TB, more than 1024 clients or such.



I intended to run glusterfs on Amazon EC2 to provide some more 
persistence to data stored on the instances (in Amazon EC2, if an 
instance dies, it "evaporates" with all data in it, so you have to do 
various workarounds). Unfortunately, Amazon EC2 pricing for 64 bit is 
pretty heavy (and all my instances run 32 bit anyway).

I wanted to run 32 bit glusterfs clients and servers on Amazon EC2 
(probably no more than 6 servers, 20-30 clients, up to 1 TB data).


What are your experiences with running glusterfs on 32 bit?



[1] 
http://www.gluster.com/community/documentation/index.php/Storage_Server_Installation_and_Configuration


-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org