This has never caused any problems before. I'd actually completely forgotten about it until RVM or Ruby or RubyGems (I haven't decided yet who to blame) choked

This has never caused any problems before. I'd actually completely forgotten about it until RVM or Ruby or RubyGems (I haven't decided yet who to blame) choked. And it wasn't my choice — I started out 32-bit to save RAM on what used to be a fairly dinky plan. Some years later, Linode said I oughta switch to a 64-bit kernel for some obscure reason I can't remember.