Re: Hardware suggestions for Linux/PGSQL server

William Yu <wyu@talisys.com>

From: William Yu <wyu@talisys.com>
To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-12-12T16:35:17Z
Lists: pgsql-performance
Shridhar Daithankar wrote:
> 
> FWIW, there are only two pieces of software that need 64bit aware for a 
> typical server job. Kernel and glibc. Rest of the apps can do fine as 32 
> bits unless you are oracle and insist on outsmarting OS.
> 
> In fact running 32 bit apps on 64 bit OS has plenty of advantages like 
> effectively using the cache. Unless you need 64bit, going for 64bit 
> software is not advised.

This is a good point. While doing research on this matter a few months 
back, I saw comments by people testing 64-bit MySQL that some operations 
would run faster and some slower due to the use of 64-bit datatypes 
versus 32-bit. The best solution in the end is probably to run 32-bit 
Postgres under a 64-bit kernel -- unless your DB tends to have a lot of 
64-bit datatypes.