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I'm in the process of selecting an AMI for my website on the Amazon EC2 network. It seems like the Ubuntu instances come in either 32 or 64 bit flavors. Presumably the 64 bit systems give you more memory address space, which is good. However, I'm wondering if it is a problem finding pre-compiled binaries. Am I better off sticking with 32 bit? My web application is not terribly memory intensive.
Why would I select one over the other and what are the pros and cons?
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In the “System Settings” window, double-click the “Details” icon in the “System” section. In the “Details” window, on “Overview” tab, look for the “OS type” entry. You'll see either “64-bit” or “32-bit” listed, along with other basic information about your Ubuntu system.
The difference is that a 32-bit system can process 32 bits in one cycle, similar a 64-bit system can process 64 bits in one cycle. The major difference is that in a 32-bit system you will be able to use only 2^32 bytes of RAM which is around 4GB. Similarly, for 64-bit systems, you can use up-to 16 Exa-Bytes of RAM.
AWS OpsWorks Stacks supports the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu 12.04 is supported for all stacks.
General-Purpose. M3 instances are the newest generation of general-purpose instances, and give you the option of a larger number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) that provide higher performance. M3 instances are recommended if you are seeking general-purpose instances with demanding CPU requirements.
You should make your decision based on the size of the servers you want.
32-bit AMIs only run on m1.small, while 64-bit AMIs only run on m1.large and m1.xlarge instances (plus the respective High CPU variants).
Larger instances obviously cost more money, with price theoretically scaling linearly with performance. However, I've found that large and xlarge instances actually have a little more performance / dollar than small instances.
Rather than being due to 32- or 64-bit architecture, this seems to be due to contention on I/O controllers. If you're doing serious work on EC2, I'd recommend going with m1.large instances, and the 64-bit AMIs that that entails.
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