[nzlug] 32bit vs 64bit speed/performance

[Howard]

Jack Pivac said on 10/16/2007 10:43 PM:
> What with a new Ubuntu round the corner I'm going to do a clean install 
> and wondering 32bit or 64bit?
> 
> Have you found much performance increase by going with 64bit? (And just 
> normal day to day stuff, no weird compiling/mathematical equations etc)

I use 64 Bit Ubuntu for my main workstation on a 2GHz AMD machine of a 
year or so old.  My uni maths has long since been forgotten, so so 
problems there... and have not had to compile anything for a workstation 
for a long time.

No performance comparisons are measurable as I've never tried 32 bit 
Ubuntu on this or anything else.  I'm told rule of thumb is about 10% 
performance increase for 64bit, but I guess it would depend on what type 
of software you were mainly using it for.  And yes, I run a lot of 'day 
to day stuff' on this box... :)

If I was really worried about an extra few % points in performance 
increases, I'd probably be better off overclocking & increasing cooling 
to my processor anyway - or buy a faster machine.  So I'd have no probs 
going back to 32 bit if I found an issue with something - I haven't yet 
though.

> Any major problems with 64bit?

no problems that have ever concerned me.  I think there are still issues 
with some proprietary Firefox plugins e.g. flash, but I believe they are 
relatively easily worked around.  I've never bothered with Flash sites 
so haven't installed the plugins (including on my Windows laptop).

The last 64 bit problems I've ever seen was when I used Fedora Core 4 
for my workstation.  I'm sure they were fixed in the later Fedoras 
anyway.  I ran a 32 bit Firefox in those days so all the plugins worked, 
but haven't bothered on this box.

In fact, I forget that I'm using 64 bit until something new comes out 
(like the CONFIG_NO_HZ feature in the latest kernel for Ubuntu 7.10), 
and you think 'thats useful, I'll have that', until you read somewhere 
that they haven't added it in the 64 bit stable kernel yet...

cheers
H