64-bit Kernel Question

[Jonathan Kamens]

Chris Adams wrote:
> Also, as things grow and you add RAM, i386 tops out at 4G unless you use
> PAE (which still has a 4G process-size limit and has a performance
> impact), while x86_64 can handle much more RAM (more than any consumer
> motherboard can hold today by far).  It may sound silly today, but RAM
> usage is only going up (because programs do more, we run more programs
> simultaneously, and because of ever-present bloat).
>   
It's not silly today.  My company switched to 64-bit a year and a half 
ago because the java process which drives our application was running 
out of memory (we hold a /lot/ of data in memory) at larger clients, and 
we couldn't make it any larger because of the 4G process-size limit.  In 
short, the need to use 64-bit really does occur now in the real world.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of appliances at customer sites which can't 
run 64-bit, because some have CPUs so old that they don't support it and 
others don't have enough RAM.  So we're stuck supporting both 32-bit and 
64-bit versions of our appliance platform for the foreseeable future (ugh).

  jik

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/attachments/20090309/af55fe47/attachment.htm>