Chris Dennis <cgdennis(a)btinternet.com> said, in message 564C56EB.1010207(a)btinternet.com: I always go 64 bit where possible, these days. A couple of years back I ran into problems on some machines at work, where the 64 bit kernel was fine and the 32 bit one, with the same nominal config, was subject to random crashes. Since I couldn't see any userland reason not to migrate, we moved all our servers over. It's probably not such an issue if you're using the Debian-supported 32 bit kernel, but I do get the impression that 64 bit kernels on x86 might be subject to better testing than 32 bit these days. Cheers, Alun. -- Alun Jones, auj(a)aber.ac.uk, 01970 622637 Mathemateg, Ffiseg a Chyfrifiadureg, Prifysgol Aberystwyth Mathematics, Physics & Computer Science, Aberystwyth University

Hi Chris, There's a very old wiki page which states: " 32 or 64-bit? At the time of writing, all BitFolk VPSes are 32-bit. Almost all VPSes have a small amount of memory, thus do not run up against the address space limits inherent in 32-bit platforms. Also, a 64-bit platform has larger pointers and integers so would actually use more memory for the same tasks. For these reasons there are no immediate plans to start offering 64-bit distributions and it is recommended that you stick with a 32-bit version of your chosen distribution. All BitFolk hosts are, however, 64-bit and could run 64-bit virtual machines, so you could try this on the understanding that you would be travelling well off the beaten path." https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Installing_unsupported_distributions The time of writing was 2011 though - I think back then the base VPS had 240MiB of RAM, but on the new hardware the base is now 1024MiB. So the RAM issue is pretty much gone. There is a little bloat in going to 64 bit binaries, around the order of 30%-50%, but on most Linux servers there's a lot less software installed which helps mitigate that... You should get a performance benefit of around 10% for most workloads, as the 64 bit architecture is more efficient and allows better optimisations of compiled code. That's not guaranteed, of course! I've not noticed any workarounds required or other oddities in running 64 bit distributions at home - everything now seems fairly stable and well supported. That having been said, my VPS is still 32 bit due to age. Unless Andy has any negative experiences, I'd say it depends on your usage. If this VPS is your business, or is otherwise critical, then why risk it? If it's got high workloads, similarly I'd advise caution. But that's just me being "professional sysadmin" - risk averse! I think that the time for 64 bit on Bitfolk looks nigh, and if I were building a new non-critical VPS I'd probably prefer to go 64 bit to future proof it... Regards, Phil -------- Sent from a mobile device, please excuse my brevity. On 18 November 2015 10:46:19 Chris Dennis <cgdennis(a)btinternet.com> wrote:

Chris Dennis asked: From my experience, a 64-bit system will be a bit faster at CPU-limited things, but you're unlikely to notice. A server spends a huge percentage of its time in the idle loop and most of the rest dealing with the disc system. But it will take up noticeably more RAM - not so much the larger addresses everywhere in the code, but the way the page size for the virtual memory is much larger - so that can mean things swapping more and slowing the whole very noticeably down. When you have a server with much more RAM, 64-bits makes sense. But not, I think, with 1GiB. Other people will doubtless disagree :) Ian

On 18/11/15 10:46, Chris Dennis wrote: Thanks to all for the varied replies. It seems to boil down to: * a 64-bit system might run a bit faster * a 64-bit system might use a bit more RAM (and therefore possibly do more swapping and run a bit slower) So I'm still not sure... Cheers, Chris