64bit CPUs
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Sun May 1 20:45:09 PDT 2005
On Sun, 1 May 2005, Mike Tancsa wrote:
> A somewhat obvious question to some perhaps, but what server application
> mix on FreeBSD today sees an improvement using 64bit CPUs ? In my ISP
> centric world, my big apps are BIND, IMAP/POP3, httpd via apache, SMTP,
> AV and SPAM scanning, and firewalls/routing. Apart from larger RAM, why
> would these benefit from the 64bit world ? Or would they ?
RAM/address space is the big reason. In fact, applications compiled for
64-bits may well run slower than 32-bit ones running on the 64-bit kernel.
Note that systems like Solaris default build many programs as 32-bit,
since there's no benefit to running ls(1) with a 64-bit address space.
On the other hand, if you need a large memory system, running a 64-bit
system will give you better support and utilization than a 32-bit system
runing with PAE, at least on FreeBSD.
Robert N M Watson
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