Upgrading to amd64 requires recompilation of ports?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 12:04:01PM +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 06:21:40PM -0400, Indigo 23 wrote:
> >  Does anyone think that its worth the hassle? If you do manage to get
> >  it up and running, will you see any noticeable advantages or is it
> >  better to just stick with i386? The only caveat that I can see is a
> >  recompilation of all the ports.  Any thoughts?
> 
> You don't really _need_ it unless you've got more than four gigs of RAM
> and are routinely running out of memory on i386. Then again, I installed
> amd64 instead of i386 because I could. :-) No regrets so far.

s/'ve got more than four gigs of RAM and//.  Regardless of amount of
RAM, lack of virtual address space on i386 is crippling for certain
uses, for example ZFS.

> Some stuff like binary drivers, flash player, is not available on
> amd64 (not necessarily a bad thing :-). I think i386 has more ports
> available as packages.
> 
> Amd 64 will use some more disk space and RAM.

Certain CPU-intensive applications will be faster when compiled for
amd64 (because of e.g. more registers being available).  Other
applications may be slower because of increased time required to copy
64-bit pointers compared to 32-bit.  There are other architectural
differences (e.g. 4 levels of page tables) that may also cause
different performance characteristics, plus and minus.

It all depends on your workload, so you have to test it and see.

Kris