From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 29 10:25:57 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B7B6816A4CE for ; Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:25:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from mta2.adelphia.net (mta2.adelphia.net [68.168.78.178]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DA36E43FCB for ; Wed, 29 Oct 2003 10:25:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wmoran@potentialtech.com) Received: from potentialtech.com ([68.68.113.33]) by mta2.adelphia.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.05 201-253-122-130-105-20030824) with ESMTP id <20031029182559.XPRA17912.mta2.adelphia.net@potentialtech.com> for ; Wed, 29 Oct 2003 13:25:59 -0500 Message-ID: <3FA00634.6000002@potentialtech.com> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 13:25:56 -0500 From: Bill Moran User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20031005 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: chat@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: How much better are 64 but platforms X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 18:25:57 -0000 Hey, I've never used FreeBSD on a 64 bit platform, and with a recent project I've got a client asking me, "How much faster would this run if we put it on an Itanium." So, in the future, I'll probably be getting a 64 bit machine to try this out on. But it got me thinking, what should I _expect_ to see in improvement? This application is mostly comparing strings, there are no 64 bit integers or floats to be obvious bottlenecks on a 32 bit platform, so (lacking actual experience) how much can I expect the application to speed up if I move it to a 64 bit platform? I understand that nobody can answer this question exactly, but I'm curious to hear people's experiences. I mean, if you just took FreeBSD (for example) by itself and moved it from 32 - 64 bit, how much faster is it (assuming the same mhz processor, if possible). How about PostgreSQL (which is the database server we're using). In general, how much faster is C compiled on a 64 bit platform? Basically, all this app does is pull a crapload of database records into RAM, do a whole bunch of string comparisons, generate some percentages, and write significant results back to another database table. Should I expect 64 bit to be a big improvement? Any thoughts or experience would be welcome. Thanks in advance. -- Bill Moran Potential Technologies http://www.potentialtech.com