Advice on changing to 64 bits

[solarflow99]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Roger Heflin <rogerheflin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Klaus-Peter Schrage wrote:
>
>> Up to last week, I had Fedora running in subsequent versions 2 or so to 10
>> on my old Pentium 4 system.
>>
>> Now I have a rather recent new desktop computer with much of the latest
>> and greatest hardware: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4 GB RAM, harddrive with
>> lots of Gagabytes and so on.
>>
>> Thinking about changing to 64 bits architecture (I have the i386
>> installation dvd, but not yet the i86_64 one), I was astonished how little I
>> found on pros and cons. So what would you advise?
>>
>> 1. Changing to 64 bits is a must for you.
>> 2. You will benefit from it.
>> 3. Keep your hands off, stay with 64 bits.
>> 4. ...
>>
>> I should mention that I want to use virtualization (KVM, VMware Server),
>> and that the processor has Intel's hardware vitualization capabilities.
>>
>> Thanks for any pointers.
>> Klaus
>>
>>
> Something to note, I don't know why but the 64-bit versions of Firefox and
> Thunderbird use a lot more memory than the 32-bit versions,  I was
> originally running a 32-bit f9 with 3GB ram w/2GB swap, and almost never got
> into swap, after switching to 10 64-bit, I had to add 2GB more of swap and
> was getting deep into the 4GB of swap, I uninstalled 64-bit
> firefox/openoffice and thunderbird and put in the 32-bit version and the
> memory usage went down quite a bit.   The memory usage was a at least 50%
> more.
>
>
that seems to make sense, With 64, you have twice the register size, so that
means double the footprint, for some things could be a bit slower, (twice
the throughput between the ram and CPU) otherwise i've found little
difference in performance and i've used 32/64 a lot.  The ram addressing is
the main advantage, since there's a small hit with using PAE, it depends how
much I/O is involved.  Glad to hear others experience too, hope this
helps...
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