Advantages of 64-bitness for LAMP applications?

Christopher Schmidt crschmidt at crschmidt.net
Thu Dec 23 08:56:01 EST 2004


On Thu, Dec 23, 2004 at 08:21:33AM -0500, Ted Roche wrote:
> I have a fundamental question on the advantages of 64-bit CPU systems 
> for current Linux-Apache-MySQL/PostGreSQL-PHP/Perl/Python applications. 
> Is there a price/performance advantage, and if so, where are the 
> benefits?
> 
> Most of the  work I've been doing is fairly low-traffic data-driven web 
> sites or direct access to a database server. Do the 64-processors 
> provide any advantages in these situations, or should I just stick with 
> 32-bit processors? I can see where a 64-bit machine might have 
> advantages in heavy number crunching or ray-tracing, or in other 
> high-performance situations where the software's been tuned for it, but 
> that's not where I'm concentrating.

I've watched with interest as LiveJournal.com (high traffic weblogging 
site: something along the lines of 2000 hits/second currently, I think) 
switches their servers to 64bit. The main reason for them is the "very 
real" memory limitations that smaller processors limit you to on 32bit. 
However, I also watched as they spent a full two months being screwed 
over by various suppliers as they tried to put these machines together.

I've seen lots of indications that if you have the money to spend on 
memory, having the extra addressable space can be a big help to things 
like MySQL. However, most people can't afford more than 4 gig of memory 
per machine anyway, and even then they don't always need it.

I've never done this stuff myself: we're sticking with 32bit for the 
near future, because I can't see any benefit we need from 64bit. We need 
fallback servers, so we've just got two 32bit machines running the web 
frontend, and db really isn't heavy load for us, nor is any other Memory 
intensive application.

So, I think that the primary benefits are not in the 64 bit processing 
power, but the addressable memory issue.

This is mostly heresay though.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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