mnesia memory usage on 32 and 64 bits machines

[franz]

I admit I was tempted by the 32-bits architecture. As I'm developing a 
mnesia-centric distributed application I thought that using 32-bits 
machine would have reduced the ram consumption and the access speed. So 
I developed some tests to be run on two identical servers, one running a 
32-bits kernel and erlang, the other 64-bits.
And everything went fine, until I bumped into the "maximum heap size for 
32-bit machines", which I was unaware of: when a mnesia table exceeds 
3GB erlang crashes saying <<erlang eheap_alloc: Cannot allocate xxx 
bytes of memory (of type "heap")>>.
In conclusion, for anyone wondering, I think I'm going 64.
Regards,
franz