The Natural Philosopher <a@b.c> writes:

> Hadron wrote:
(snip)
>> This was hotly contested by some in comp.os.linux.advocacy but is
>> effectively correct. I saw no speed improvement in 64 bit over 32 bit
>> and just suffered from a far less stable system.
>>
>> Andrew Halliwell <spike1@ponder.sky.com> writes:
>>
>>> If you don't need more than 4gig of RAM, chances are, you're fine in 32 bit
>>> mode, and may even be slightly better off, performance wise.
>>
>> And certain things like flash do not work properly.
(snip)
> I think this is largely correct: I had this choice to make..for a
> moderately loaded server.
>
> Looking at some of the problems associated with the 64 bit kernels, and
> realizing that by and large my actual applications were not hugely
> computationally intensive, but more disk I/O bound, there seemed little
> point in taking the small risk of a 64 bit kernel and libraries.

This has been quite interesting for me to read. I've been running
AMD-based (Opteron and Athlon) systems for years, at home and at work,
with 64-bit kernels and not run into any problems, with stability or
otherwise, that were caused by doing that. For instance, our
twin-dualcore-CPU (two Opteron 275s) compute server has been rock-solid.
My experience with 64-bit Intel has been more recent (for example, I am
writing this on a T5200 system that can't be much over a year old, but
for that I am using CONFIG_MCORE2) but also very good.

I have flash working just fine with the help of Debian's ia32-libs
package. (-:

I will, however, happily admit that I tend to be unusually lucky when I
run new things (for example, I've been running kernel 2.6.24 for quite
some time now), that even our servers at work are fairly lightly loaded
(I try to overspec them to avoid future headaches), and that I can't
claim to have measured any actual speed improvement from choosing 64-bit
instead of 32-bit. So I may have dodged some problems without really
gaining much.

Mark