On 12/15/2010 06:41 AM, Jason Qualkenbush wrote: > I'm being asked to build a 32bit system. There is no specific reason > for this to be 32bit except my boss likes that there are less > libraries to install. This is a CentOS 5 install and they way things > work, this will remain a 32bit install for the next four years (until > a hardware refresh). > > It's hard for me to explain why, but that just feels dirty to me. > When in performance tuning classes, it was understood that you want > 64bit over 32bit. I can't use "people told me 64bit is better", but I > keep reading "unless you have a specific reason for 32bit, choose 64". > I need something that has details. > > Can someone provide a link to why you want to install 64bit? The best > I could come up with is this article: http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450 > which explains how PAE works. Does 64 bit matter for large files? > Network performance? > > I'm irritated that I'm being forced to build this thing as 32bit. > It's a RSyslog, Cacti, Nagios system, and if I build it, I'm pretty > much signing my name to this. It becomes a "JQ built server". I just > feel like going 64bit is better for "future proofing" this thing than > 32bit. >
64bit is better future proofing because you just don't know how things and needs will change, and it's more likely to shift to 64bit needs than 32bit. All our infrastructure apart from 3 servers are 64bit. Irritatingly one of those three is a mysql database server (we use Oracle for 95% of our stuff), so I'm stuck with a 4gb memory limit on it (sure PAE will let you address extra memory but database won't be able to use it.) 1 of them is a mail server, runs Zimbra. No one knows why the sysadmin jr set the box up as 32bit with PAE when the software it was purposed for is available 64bit, it just another one of his mind numbingly crazy decisions (when all around you are 64bit boxes, and the PXE install images are all 64bit, why would you go out of your way to make a box 32bit?) It's been fine, server does its job, except now we want to plan to upgrade Zimbra, which from the next release is 64bit only; so at some stage I'm looking at having to use another existing server to install the new version on, migrate mail, then rebuild the old box. 32bit works, it might be fractionally faster for the boxes purpose, but hell how microsecond time critical is e-mail anyway (or in your case Rsyslog, Cacti & Nagios) Consistency in an environment trumps almost all other concerns as far as I'm concerned. Paul _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
