Dell 2850 use 32 or 64 bit?

Tim Kellers timothyk at wallnet.com
Fri Dec 26 17:13:04 UTC 2008


Michel Talon wrote:
> Tim Kellers wrote:
>   
>> Thanks for the reply.  I already know it is 64 bit capable.  I 'm 
>> interested in finding out if their are measurable performance advantages 
>> to running it using 64 v 32 bit FreeBSD.
>>     
>
> For the type of use of the OP (databases, etc.) i don't know, but
> for scientific computations we observe a massive performance advantage
> running in 64 bits mode (by this i mean more than 20%, i have seen some
> Maple formal computations run 100% faster). The only problem with
> 64 bits mode is that some ports may have problems, but, as far as i
> know, these ports are more desktop oriented than server oriented. For a
> server i don't see a reason to run in 32 bits mode. Contrary to
> some frequent assertions the increase in size of binaries is
> extremely limited as can easily be checked. This is very largely
> compensated by the increase in the number of registers. The possibility
> of using more than 4 gigs memory is just one advantage of 64 bits mode,
> and by the way, very few of our machines have more than 4 gigs memory,
> and they don't lack it at all.
>
>
>   
Thanks, that was exactly what I needed to know.  There won't be any 
Desktop apps on this machine and optimal performance is what I am after.

Tim


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