64-bit cPanel/WHM - any issues?

[Reado]

I am currently looking into migrating to 64-bit web servers. Are there any known issues with cPanel/WHM on a 64-bit platform? Has anyone had any positive experiences with 64-bit servers?

Thanks in advance.

[cPanelEric]

Howdy,

I've rewritten this a few times, but it boils down to this:

My three reasons for staying with 32bit/x86 for now.

- You're not using more than 4 gigs of memory.
- Software compatibility (other than cPanel) somethings just won't work in 64bit environments. Ask a BSD x64 user about flash support.
- Lib support when compiling tools or other things you use outside of RPM's. A quick trip through RPM purgatory could make you run back to 32bit.

There are a lot of opinions on this subject too, so don't let that drag you down from making your chose.

Thanks!

[cPanelMattCurry]

Hello,

cPanel runs well on a 64bit system, as long as you have the correct hardware you should be fine. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you,
Matthew Curry

[Reado]

Thanks both, but I think I'll end up sticking with 32-bit for now.

[Spiral]

Thanks both, but I think I'll end up sticking with 32-bit for now.

I don't advise staying with 32 bit if your CPU supports 64 bit and unless you are running a really old processor on your server it probably does!

Everything "cpanelerice" said is really the state of the world as of several years ago and is far from how things are today and most of the statement made are from an era back when 64 bit support was really transitional and supporting hardware was only starting to emerge. Today, 64 bit is the definitive standard and the "norm" for new servers!

Cpanel / WHM run absolutely beautifully in 64 bit without any problems whatsoever and I have personally setup and run hundreds if not thousands of servers over the past 4 or 5 years that I have been dealing in 64 bit Cpanel based servers (That's right, I was one of the early adopters too!)

Even back when people used to moan and whine about installing libraries they didn't understand, I was already installing 64 bit systems even then without any issues whatsoever. To cpanelerice's credit, back then you really did need to know what you were doing to get things setup correctly but today that is all entirely different now and today a 3 year old child could probably install a decent working 64 bit platform with full 64 bit across the board and 64 bit Cpanel / WHM!

The performance differences between 32 bit and 64 bit are significant and you will be kicking yourself later if you setup 32 bit and find out just how much better 64 bit would have been the entire time!

[kris1351]

I use 64bit on the cPanel and DA servers with no issues. We put 4-16gb of ram in each box though so it is much smoother than depending on a PAE kernel. The old days of needing 32 bit apps for servers are pretty much gone really. For the very few things you might need you can compile the 32bit libraries, but there is nothing on either control panel we have found that need for.

[Reado]

Thanks for the feedback Spiral and kris1351. The servers we run are the following spec:

Intel Xeon 2.5GHz (Dual CPU)
1.5GB RAM
30GB HDD
Xen 3.4 w/ Cent OS 5.3

From that spec would I see much of a difference do you think? The 32-bit servers we run at the moment are on a similar spec, but only run two 2.0GHz CPUs.

In terms of what we want to run, it's mostly PHP, but we do a lot of CPU intensive stuff, like DOMPDF which converts HTML/CSS into PDFs. The PDF compilation side of things takes about 45 seconds to compile 2 sheets of a mass of tables, images, text, etc, which uses a lot of CPU. Would you think we would see a benefit by having this run on a 64-bit machine?

Thanks in advance.

[Data 1]

With 1.5G of ram I would stay with 32.

I run 64 on my latest server but it has 8G of ram.

It runs just fine by the way, no issues at all. Hardware must support it.

If the processor isn't 64bit Centos will tell you before you install

[Reado]

Yeah the processor is definitely 64-bit capable. The host say they have customers with 64-bit VPSs on the same host as the one they would put me on (contains faster Xeon CPUs).

Is there anything wrong with running 1.5GB RAM? Would the machine crash or something is what I mean? Or would it run like any other?

The reason why Ideally I'd like to start looking at this now is because we will be looking at upgrading to a much higher spec in the near future as I'm currently developing all our internal processes and applications to be web based rather than client/server based as they are currently. So my look at this was if we get 64-bit now, then when we do need the extra RAM (which will cost double to what we're paying now) we won't need to upgrade to 64-bit, we'll already have it.

Does that make sense?

But if you could let me know whether 64-bit would run on 1.5GB RAM and what issues I could expect to see, I would be grateful.

[Data 1]

You wouldn't "gain" anything using a 64bit OS with only 1.5G of ram IMO. It would run just fine and wouldn't cause any problems I know of.

I thought the main idea of 64bit OS's was to use more than 3G of ram without setting up PAE. Anyone else?

[alphaservers]

Yeah the processor is definitely 64-bit capable. The host say they have customers with 64-bit VPSs on the same host as the one they would put me on (contains faster Xeon CPUs).

Is there anything wrong with running 1.5GB RAM? Would the machine crash or something is what I mean? Or would it run like any other?

The reason why Ideally I'd like to start looking at this now is because we will be looking at upgrading to a much higher spec in the near future as I'm currently developing all our internal processes and applications to be web based rather than client/server based as they are currently. So my look at this was if we get 64-bit now, then when we do need the extra RAM (which will cost double to what we're paying now) we won't need to upgrade to 64-bit, we'll already have it.

Does that make sense?

But if you could let me know whether 64-bit would run on 1.5GB RAM and what issues I could expect to see, I would be grateful.

howdy all,

i,m just remember only that 64-bit is not secured to use into your machine
if you care with security problems 64-bit is ok because have fastest accessing for files upload and download, big resources and etc but remember what happend if someone haxor accessing your machine with 64-bit connection time, they are very like it you know

[cpanelkenneth]

Using a 64-bit operating system with less than 4 GB of RAM is not recommended.

In general 64-bit applications will consume more RAM than their 32-bit equivalents. 32-bit operating systems can often access up to 64 GB of RAM, using PAE. Using PAE does impose some limitations, and individual applications will still be constrained by virtual memory they can allocate.

Also, that last comment about security makes little sense. 64-bit operating systems are not inherently less secure than the 32-bit versions. Nor are they more secure. They are the same.