Jason Qualkenbush <[email protected]> writes: > 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. My understanding is that all other things being equal, a 32-bit system uses slightly less ram. Those 64MiB ram guests I sell? It's damn hard to get them to even boot from a 64-bit install. they boot fine with a 32-bit install (though, they still only have 64MiB ram; toys, really, for people who like to play in those sorts of environments. But they do boot; I was running bind in one for a dnsbl for a while, and you have a /lot/ more breathing room if you run 32-bit than 64.) Ram is one of those things where until you have enough, nothing else matters, but once you have enough, adding more doesn't help you at all, so depending on how much ram you have this may not be an issue at all, and there are some computational advantages, I'm given to understand, to the 64-bit platform. Still, if you are ram-constrained, I /strongly/ recommend sticking with a 32-bit system. > 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. Eh, I think as far as 'future proofing' the most important bit is to choose a distro that will be supported for as long as you expect the thing to be in production. This is why I like RHEL/CentOS so much. Now, I usually try to have a 3 year hardware lifecycle rather than a 4 year like you seem to, but even so, it's nice to be able to install RHEL5/centos5 now and know that I won't have to worry about a major upgrade until it's time to throw out the hardware. (yes, RHEL6 is out... but aside from CentOS6 still building, I generally consider the .0 and .1 releases of RHEL to be 'public beta' - it doesn't get to the point where you can fire and forget your 'yum ugrade' commands until .2 or .3, usually.) If you are going with RHEL5, a i386 platform is just fine in that regard. Redhat will continue to support it. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ 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/
