>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Kasak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Daniel> There is NO speed difference between 32 and 64 bit on AMD processors.

Sorry, but that is not true.

In long mode there are twice as many general purpose registers and twice
as many vector registers.  The ABI used by Linux and the BSDs -- and I
would have to presume Solaris as well -- takes advantage of the extra
registers and does result in faster execution for most (compiled) code.

There is extra pressure on the cache due to the larger size of pointers
and longs -- which is what causes 64 bit code to run slower on cpus like
the Power, MIPS and SPARC families -- but that is more than offset by
the improved ABI.  

Daniel> The main difference for database use is that 64 bit processors
Daniel> can address MUCH more memory, so your DB software doesn't have
Daniel> to do nasty tricks ( that slow things down ) to deal with large
Daniel> databases.

The above said, that is indeed the real reason to prefer 64 bit for the
database manager process even on processors like the UltraSPARC.

Also, the schema in the dbmail sources makes heavy use of the INT8 data
type.  PG handles those much better on an -m64 compile than on a -m32
compile.  The speed increase I got when I converted my personal mail
store to use INT4 everywhere INT8 is currently specified -- except for
the dbmail_users table; my curmail_size is greater than 2 Gigs -- was
significant.  And I cut my disk space usage by about half.

Definitely compile postgresql with -m64.  If you are on amd64 also
compile dbmail with -m64.  On UltraSPARC you may find dbmail will run
faster compiled with -m32, but given how much use it makes of int64_t
I'd give both versions a test.

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
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