Time to choose: 32 or 64 bits Os

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max2000

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Hi,

I have finished building my fastest servers, Xeons 64, plenty of RAM... etc

Early this week, I will ship it to the Data Center. I can't install Direct Admin from home du to licensing restrictions.

The big question is if I should install CentOs 32 bit or CentOs 64 bit.

As my CPUs supports 64-bit Os, I feel it as waste of hardware to install a 32 bit one.

What do you recommend? The data center remote hands are too expensive to ask them to install another Os for me. I need the have the right Os from the first shot.

Thank you for your help!
 
I was in the same place about 2 months ago, I went with CentOS 32bit. I wanted 64bit but just felt it not quite ready yet. Not the OS itself rather what we run in it as a collaboration of software.

Maybe some of the people using the latest versions will comment though.
 
The big question is what are you going to use it for? :)

Centos 4.3 64bit demonstrated about 10%-25% performance gain over Centos 4.3 32bit in our tests.

For example, importing 2GB+ sql file into mysql took 6m23.861s vs 8m13.649s on 32bit version.
The tests were performed on a clean out-of-the-box installations, i.e. MySQL 4 without DirectAdmin.

DA for Centos 4.3 64 bit automatically installs MySQL 5 while 32 bit installation comes with MySQL 4.1.
In our tests, MySQL 5 outperformed MySQL 4 by a considerable margin (about 40%).

However, this all is pretty much irrelevant if your fast performing server can't fulfill its purpose because software versions conflicts, so if you want to be safe - go with 32bit version. You probably won't use its power to the full extent anyway.
 
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I'm running Centos 64bit on a AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3100+ with 2GB of RAM.
I needed to install a new custom 2.16 kernel tho because the time was running too fast.
It's running on Apache, MySQL5 and PHP5 and works like a charm.
Needed to manually recompile some stuff, but must say i'm very satisfied with it as it's running now.
 
We are running Centos 4.2 64 bits on an AMD Opteron server.
We did not experience any problems in combination with DA.

There might be some issues if you would like to use some upgrade scripts or other scripts which are created for 32 bits Operating Systems. Not all scripts are 64 bits aware.

You can of course adapt the scripts to your needs but it means more work. On the other hand it is likely that the 64 bits release run faster, that is a benefit over the 32 bits OS.
 
Hi

Thank you for your feedback.

The server will be shipped to the DC tomorrow with CentOs 4.3 64-bit installed.

I paid many $$$$ for the hardware so I am not going to install a limited Os. This server will host about 600 websites, so any % of power is welcome.

I will keep you updated !
 
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