Ok, you have a point. I probably don’t value it that much because it’s been like that on rules DSL ever.
But I don’t see this to be valueable enough to change the recommendation. And it’s a bug that needs fixing. Upscaling hardware/OS/middleware is just a workaround.
32 and 64 bit openHABian are available, and we’ll have to keep providing 32bit builds for owners of RPi 2 and older hardware.
Agreed, and we even have someone from the GraalVM development team on our issue helping out. But OH’s way of using GraalVM is a use case they never considered and is definitely not in their main path. The only solution thus far is “use a 64-bit JRE or GraalVM”. If it is a bug and it’s a bug in the upstream… 
, what can we do about it beyond taking their recommendation?
I think my main point is the blanket black and white “use 32-bit, don’t even consider 64-bit” is more of a gray area. The fact that you support a 64-bit openHABian also is an indicator that there is some gray area here.
I’m not recommending 32-bit be dropped or even that we don’t recommend 32-bit first. But I wonder if a more nuanced warning should be offered. Currently the section says:
64 bit?
RPi 3 and 4 have a 64 bit processor and you may want to run openHAB in 64 bit. Be aware that running in 64 bit has no relevant advantages but a major drawback: increased memory usage. That is not a good idea on a heavily memory constrained platform like a RPi.
On x86 hardware, 64 bit is the standard.
My biggest concern is the “no relevant advantages”. Maybe we can replace that with something like
Be aware that running 64 bit has a major drawback: increased memory usage. This can be a problem on a memory constrained platform like an RPi running openHAB which required a large amount of memory. Any reason to run on 64 bits needs to be weighted against this limitation.
I don’t particularly like the specific wording I’ve come up with but I think that gets my point across. Then in the Blockly and JS Scripting docs we can offer, “if you are on an RPi 4/5 with 4GB+ RAM and little else running on the machine, 64 bit is recommended. If you are on an RPi 3 or otherwise memory constrained, sorry, you are kind of out of luck and have to live with the slow initial load of Blockly and JS Scripting rules.”
I changed the wording in the README, see also OHian release link
Compare to previous images where the 32-bit and 64-bit image are nearly of the same size this time ( bookworm release 1.9 ) the 64-bit image is only about half of the size of the 32-bit image.
Is this expected ?