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If the question is "Debian x64 or Debian x86 for 2GB of RAM?" then the answer is "x86 should be ok".
I say get 64bit anyway.
Why?
@kampung on 32bit a single process cannot allocate more than 3G. On 64bit it can.
Note that you don't need to have 5G of memory to be able to allocate 5G. Allocating and using are not the same thing.
he only have 2gb ram
32 bit
2GB RAM? vote 32bit
what application you will run? if chess engine, i vote 64bit
64-bit, because 2GB is more than enough RAM to not be concerned about a bit higher RAM usage, but you will get higher performance.
http://ompldr.org/vZzZicA/2012-11-07T110452Z-64.png
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1210_3264
Does it hold true that 64bit is faster than 32bit, when running KVM VPS?
@jcaleb yes.
x86 CPUs can operate twice as many registers in the 64-bit mode, that's where most of the performance benefit comes from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amd64#Architectural_features
Thanks. I miss the button, hope they put it back soon
32bit apps using less RAM. You have only 2GB so go for 32bit OS.
@rm_ I believe different kernel version does have certain effect on the performance numbers. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_natty_pae64&num=3 suggested a different view for Apache on 2.6.38.
For most end users, the 'simple' questions are, will I use more than 4GB of ram, or will I access files larger than 4GB that determines x64 vs x86. The more complicated question is, do I actually use enough CPU usage to take advantage of the extra processing per cycles.
For most people 32bit tends to work fine on most common linux distributions, and depending on the software you use tends to be pretty stable (though x64 been around long enough that major distros would have already stabilized all the common stuff).
For something like FreeBSD however, I've found in certain cases 64bit is preferable if you're on something like KVM, because the virtio drivers in the FreeBSD Ports appear to be more stable compared to compiling it on the 32bit version of FreeBSD 9. So really depends on what you're doing.
@jcaleb 'faster' depends, saying that it's twice as fast as 32bit is not correct as in the real world scenario it depends on the software packages you are running, and in some cases you might only see a 10% performance boost.
So you found perhaps the only bizzare result where 64-bit was slower, in some 1.5 year old article with a kernel branch that is no longer even being released, congratulations! Must have spent the whole evening looking for it? And now simply check the benchmark I linked, not any slowdown in the Apache results in sight.
On this forum where people easily run a dozen of services within some 128 MB yearly LEB, 2GB is not "only", it's more than plenty.
Excuse me but who said that? The performance increase is about 10-30% depending on the task, and maybe up to 50-70 only in very specialized cases like cryptography and media encoding.
mKS 2G proc (intel atom) is not so fast.
So, if 64 bit is faster, then it will really help.
Well,
I'm not sure about my usage. It will be my & friends development server. Some softwares that might be installed:
I default to 64bit as exploitation of memory corruption errors is harder on 64bit (think remote holes in OpenSSL etc). Not impossible, but harder.
@rm_ "x86 CPUs can operate twice as many registers in the 64-bit mode, that's where most of the performance benefit comes from." implies it without an explanation in-thread.
@kampung I missed the part where it was a dedicated server, in which case if the CPU supports 64bit then by all means go 64.
...does not mean twice as fast, a lot faster, but probably not by 2x on most tasks.
However for some encryption-related tasks (probably in part VPN too), this might well be the case:
http://www.phoronix.com/data/img/results/ubuntu_natty_pae64/8.png