I am surprised there are still so many i386 installations. I have been running mostly amd64 for quite some years now. Both for severs and desktops. I know for sure the servers my job bought in 2007 ran amd64.
On bare metal it's a different story, though, but I still would think that there are more virtual servers than real ones.
And what difference does virtual versus physical machines make? Heck, you can even run virtual 64-bit guests on a 32-bit host machine if the CPU supports either Intel-VT or AMD-V.
But interpreting those results indicates to me that there are possible problems with this platform where f.ex. file copy performance is ~50% faster on 32bit than 64bit.
To me just assuming that there is no difference and go with instinct without anything concrete evidence is the wrong way to go.
As the OP seems to have suggested, virtual machines don't have a lot of memory.
If there's a 'lm' in flags, it works in 64-bit mode
I guess Debian is the kind of distribution you put on a computer that is going to to sit in a room and run the same non-taxing services for years without attention.
I guess Debian is the kind of distribution you put on a computer that you want to sit in a room and run for years without a problem.
The new multiarch support should finally allow me to change that.