I want to use my RPi3 Model B as web server (classic LAMP stack + python, maybe other things too) where I will host my own web-based projects. I'm now deciding which OS to run; I have tried following options:
- Raspbian Desktop 32bit (it would've been better to use Lite version but it's the one I installed first - does it make sense to test on Lite too?)
- Ubuntu Server 20.04.1 64bit
- Ubuntu Server 20.04.1 32bit
I decided to benchmark it against one of my apps which I know has a heavy function. The results of calling the heavy function are following
- ~1.6s
- ~120ms
- ~90ms
This obviously put Raspbian Desktop out of question and I'm now deciding which of the 2 Ubuntu servers to use. Looking at memory consumption after booting
- --
- ~320M
- ~210M
Since RPi3 has only 1GB memory, from this point of view 64bit version doesn't make much sense.
However, intuitively, I'd expect future software to definitely support 64bit, but maybe not 32bit (perhaps PHP8 will not support 32bit? Or future versions of Python? Maybe I will want to install something that doesn't support 32bit?).
Because of the last (intuitive) reason, I'm leaning towards the 64bit version.
Is this conclusion correct? Or is my worry about lack of 32bit software in future groundless? Which one would you choose?
