The limitation WAS obvious to a great number of people. It's in the documentation, it's on the download page, and it's posted in several blogs available via google searches.
Beyond that I'm not sure why anyone would run a production system on a 32 bit system anymore. Sure the failing silently part sucks but really this seems much more like a poor deployment then a actual bug in mongodb being the root cause.
Beyond that I'm not sure why anyone would run a production system on a 32 bit system anymore. Sure the failing silently part sucks but really this seems much more like a poor deployment then a actual bug in mongodb being the root cause.