On Wed, 15 Dec 2010, Paul Graydon wrote: > 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.)
It's acutally worse than that. unless you use a non-standard setting MySQL is going to be limited to 1G of ram (the rest of the address space is reserved for the kernel) David Lang > 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/ > _______________________________________________ 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/
