>>>>> "Jason" == Jason Qualkenbush <[email protected]> writes:
Jason> I'm being asked to build a 32bit system. There is no specific Jason> reason for this to be 32bit except my boss likes that there are Jason> less libraries to install. This is a CentOS 5 install and they Jason> way things work, this will remain a 32bit install for the next Jason> four years (until a hardware refresh). So does your boss anticipate that the system will never need more than 4Gb of RAM? And why on earth does he care how many libraries are installed, disk space is cheap. And standardizing on one build across all servers means you save time overall. Building special configurations just leads to chaos. Jason> It's hard for me to explain why, but that just feels dirty to Jason> me. When in performance tuning classes, it was understood that Jason> you want 64bit over 32bit. I can't use "people told me 64bit Jason> is better", but I keep reading "unless you have a specific Jason> reason for 32bit, choose 64". I need something that has Jason> details. It's not so much a performance issue, as it is a memory and addressing issue. If you have large files over 2Gb, or memory over 4Gb, then you need 64bits. It's just the smarter choice. Don't argue from a performance standpoint, argue from a consistency standpoint. Jason> Can someone provide a link to why you want to install 64bit? I do it cause I'm lazy and I'd rather have 100 64bit systems than 98 64bit and 2 ramdomly special 32bit systems. Heck, I took our old 32bit compute nodes and virtualized them onto a 64bit ESX server just so we could keep them around if we needed them, but not waste resources like power, rack space, cooling, etc, on them. Jason> The best I could come up with is this article: Jason> http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450 which explains how PAE works. Jason> Does 64 bit matter for large files? Network performance? You can access large files on 32bit systems, and even large amounts of memory, but you hit performance issues. Jason> I'm irritated that I'm being forced to build this thing as Jason> 32bit. It's a RSyslog, Cacti, Nagios system, and if I build Jason> it, I'm pretty much signing my name to this. It becomes a "JQ Jason> built server". I just feel like going 64bit is better for Jason> "future proofing" this thing than 32bit. How do you build your other systems? Argue that consistency of the underlying platform argues for a 64bit build like the rest of your servers. This way if something goes wrong with this server, you know you can restore to any one of your *other* 64bit servers and get services up and running quicker. John _______________________________________________ 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/
