64bit or 32bit?

[50c]

Hi,
i would like to get some advice of an expert.
I have ordered two AMD Athlon 64 servers + Cpanel and im not sure if i should put CentOS 64bit or CentOS 32bit on them. Is there any big performance difference? I have read some articles that the 64 bit systems aren't ready for production yet and that Cpanel has some issues with that. And that the difference in performance ist so big. We want to use one of the servers just as a remote MySQL server and the other one just for PHP. Just strictly those 2 apps nothing else, no NS servers. Is there a big difference in performance of APACHE 2 ande 1.3.x? We have never used a 64bit system on our servers. The sales representative emailed us that since we won't use the 64bit version of CentOs we won't gain any performance advantage of the AMD 64 technology...

Thanks for your help.

Mike

 

[50c]

Anyone please...

 

[chirpy]

I would advise against 64bit linux unless you want to spend time finding fixes for library problems at various turns. It's probably fine for a raw linux install, but when you start building your own perl and such (which cPanel likes to do) it starts unravelling and you end up having to install 32bit libraries and binaries anyway. You're unlikely to see much of a performance boost either since the vast majority of the linux code has been written for the 32bit environment and simply recompiled for 64bit. Until apps have been specifically coded to take advantage of 64bit addressing, there seems little point in giving yourself a headache and I'd suggest staying with 32bit.

 

[50c]

Thanks chirpy, i made up my mind .. I'll better go 32bit, don't wanna spend my time fixing bugs..

 

[ensermo]

Hey 50C.

I have been using CentOS 3.6 64bit version on a Dual Opteron machine and also the 32bit version on a Dual Xeon machine.

Both machines have round an about the same load. The Dual Opteron performes better sometimes but that is mostly because Opteron vs Xeon and not because of 64bit vs 32bit.

Also most CPanel stuff is written for 32bit so it will have no advantage using 64bit unless you (or CPanel) writes/modifies the scripts for 64bit.

Therefor in my experience I would just recommend the 32bit version.

 

[MMarko]

stick with 32-bit

 

[50c]

Thanks guys... I've chosen 32bit version and everything is fine ...

 

[mOdY]

Well, we had a lot of bugs including apache/php/zend/I/O-problems/Glibc's but we handled them all and now we're merging all 64bit boxes into production env. and turning all 32bits to that, just waiting for cPanel to officialy support apache 2.0/2.2 to complete the remaining simple memory allocation issues, may be we're a little brave but we'r keeping an eye on things as much as we can to take the most from 64bits.

 

[Kerstin]

What would you do with so big power eaters ?

I think high performace maschines only good for special applications like
graphic, video and DVD-ripping and so on.