On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 15:15 -0800, Brian Neu wrote: > This may be an antiquated topic, but I'm still a little fuzzy on this > 64bit vs 32bit thing when it comes to performance. I know that 32 bit > operating systems and software can run faster than the 64 bit OS and > software in certain environments. However, I'm curious if a Postgres > server handling dbmail would qualify as one of those faster on 32 bit, > or on 64 bit. > > I do see in the Postgres Solaris FAQ: > > "And on other hand,32-bit code on the AMD64 CPU family is not > native, and that is why 32-bit code is significant slower on this CPU > family."
If that's in the Postgres FAQ, then I'm surprised at the FUD they've got masquerading as fact. Try the MySQL FAQ instead :) There is NO speed difference between 32 and 64 bit on AMD processors. It runs natively either way. If you run on an Itanium, then it's a different story - they do some fancy code conversion if given 32 bit binaries. The main difference for database use is that 64 bit processors can address MUCH more memory, so your DB software doesn't have to do nasty tricks ( that slow things down ) to deal with large databases. Most of the additional instructions in the AMD64 instruction set are for doing 'multimedia' ( I hate that word ) stuff, floating point maths, etc. So you won't see any benefit there by going to 64 bit. But you certainly won't see any performance regressions either. What's more, you'd be hard pushed to find a 32 bit processor these days. Most of them are 64 bit, and the budget lines are 64 bit processors, crippled to run only 32 bit instructions ( go figure ). -- Daniel Kasak IT Developer NUS Consulting Group Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060 T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au _______________________________________________ DBmail mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.fastxs.nl/mailman/listinfo/dbmail
