[mdlug] Time to jump to 64-bit?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 13:25 -0400, Dan Pritts wrote:
> whatever performance you gain will be unnoticeable.

True.

> Even wanting more memory isn't necessarily an issue.  Assuming your
> system has PAE support (not sure what all is required for that,
> just an appropriate kernel or hardware or ??), you can even add
> memory over 3.5G or whatever the actual practical 32-bit limit is.
> PAE memory access is slower than real 64-bit but really pretty damn
> fast.

True.  But an *individual process* can still only allocation about
~3.2GB or memory,  although the entirety of the system [with PAE] can
access more.  So you get a big bump if (a) you have lots of memory and
(b) you have *A* process that can benefit from oodles of memory.

Hint:  VMware.  Virtualization seems to pick up some zoom zoom when the
underlying OS is 64bit.  That was what pushed me over the edge to try
64-bit (on desktop/laptop).

On recent openSUSE 64-bit works without any issues at all.
-- 
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Linux for human beings who need to get things done.