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Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

Except that it was hidden deeply in the documentation. It's like making a car that has the gas and brake pedals switched, and then blaming accidents on people not reading section 5 of the owner's manual.

I'm hardly an inexperienced programmer. I've used Cassandra, SimpleDB, Voldemort, etc. I wrote part of the Inktomi Search Engine in the 90s, and plenty of (what today would be called) NoSQL stores over the years.

A default that's so counterintuitive for a database should be featured prominently with a huge neon sign. It wasn't in the Ruby tutorial, or in any of the many documents I read. It's buried deep in the Mongo website, and the first Google match about the 32-bit limitation is a blog post from 2009.

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As the OP points out the limit is pretty clearly specified on the download page and there's a "note" linking to the limit right next to where it says "32-bit".

Sometimes you just have to admit you screwed up and didn't read the documentation. Everyone does it, we're hackers, we'd much rather play with technology than read docs.

Being limited to 2GB, and failing silently after 2GB are different things. I know about the 2GB limit but I also would have expected an error. (Though I think I managed to enable safe mode for my internal app.)

Even your own blog posts says that you basically just followed the getting started guide for ruby. Personally, I would not use an untested, brand new to me, technology on anything that 'had to work'. And if this wasn't that important, then chalk it up to a learning experience. MongoDB's decisions might not fit your personal style, but your attitude towards learning is a poor model for technology.

It's on the download page.

http://www.mongodb.org/downloads

I installed it through Ubuntu (apt-get). Most people must (or should) be installing MongoDB through a package manager. Once again, assuming that people will see the warning because it's on the download page is shortsighted.

See dmaz's comment about the log files. I'm a complete mongodb noob as well, but found out pretty quickly that there's a 2GB limit on 32bit systems. It really is hard to miss.

It also prints to the log upon starting a 32-bit server.

It blares it at you if you try to start up a 32-bit Mongo binary. And it's on the downloads page. And in the documentation. And in every blog post about MongoDB ever.

That 2009 post is the canonical post about the issue, which is why it has such page rank. Its position is a consequence of the fact that it's linked to from all over the web, not because nobody has discussed it since.

Saying that different defaults should be documented prominently is like saying that because every piece of software is different, you should be required to read the documentation before you use it...

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