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On Thu, 6 Oct 2011, tom wrote:
I'd be interested to hear if anyone ever uses 8g and what for?
I was involved in the purchase and setup of a pair of Quad Opteron, 64GB boxes some years back (8?) They were used for chip simulations for some custom silicon the company was designing.
My own use is for virtual servers - more often than not what I run out of is RAM and not CPU cycles (and I suspect that's typicaly for your average LAMP setup), so it makes sense to have more RAM if you've got cycles to spare.
And interestingly when I was looking to see if there were any advantages of 64 over 32 for what I need systems for, it seemed that there were little to none - and even some disadvantages (code is bigger, pointers, integers, etc. bigger, so potentially slower as more memory needs accessing). There was even a story about a VPS provider using 64-bit with customers complaining that their basic memory allocations weren't enough in 64-bit mode...
However, looking again, it's not so clear now - maybe gcc has improved, or memory is faster, processors more pipelined/streamlined etc. Code is still bigger - you can't get away from that though, so there will still be a trade-off and I think I'll stick to 32-bit for now - and if I ever do a project for a customer that needs more than 3GB of RAM in a virtual server, then I'll sell them a dedicated 64-bit machine...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq