I have been impressed with the performance of 64 bits 6.4.4, and running it on a fast machine with adequate hardware setup, I think it could make a good server for development/testing purposes. In such cases, it is not all-important to mimic the production situation extremely well, but it should be close enough to estimate actual performance in common use situations and identify weak points, bottlenecks etc.

As a concrete example, I think about running remastered Knoppix in 64-bits mode on a machine with core i7-2630QM processor, 16GB of RAM and a poor man's install on a 115 GB SSD disk. One of the reasons to do it this way, is to simplify making variations on the server setup, which can be quite a lot of work. Having it on a USB stick, we can easily try it out on new hardware configurations, share among developers etc.

I started out using Scientific Linux 6 (a RedHat Enterprise Linux clone) for the actual project, but found out that it took too much administrative work to set up the development system - we would, in fact set up something that could be more or less directly transferred into production use.

Are there, for example 64-bits problems/complexities involved that make this a bad idea?