Re: [gentoo-amd64] i386 vs amd64 (continued)

[Francisco Perez]

I forgot to include a little about the box and its use

Tyan GX-28
2 * Opteron 246
8 GB's of RAM
4 250GB Seagate H.D.'s
3Ware hardware RAID controller

Services (all through portage):
Apache 2.x
PHP 5 with almost all the use flags active
POSTGRES 8.X
SQL-Ledger
NFS
SAMBA
GKrellm
CUPS printer server

Its behind the firewall and provides no services to the outside (that I 
know of :-D  ) and serve a total of 10 Workstations that store and 
retrieve all of their data from the server (nothing is stored on the 
workstations) and this include very large AutoCad and SAP2000 files.

Frank




Richard Freeman wrote:
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> On Thu, October 20, 2005 8:06 pm, Sean wrote:
>
>>So I am asking some Gentoo amd64 users, are you happy with the version
>>or would you have gained more with i386?
>>Do most applications work on amd64 or are there some important ones
>>missing?
>>
>
>
> Well, there is no question that more packages will work correctly and will
> be stable on x86 than amd64.  Especially huge packages like openoffice,
> and java also works much better on x86 (it depends on the app, some work
> better than others, and some VMs are more stable with handle different
> apps).
>
> On the other hand, in real life the differences in usability are fairly
> small.  The main deficiencies in amd64 are huge apps like openoffice that
> haven't been ported, and small obscure apps that nobody has bothered to
> get working.  Obviously the x86 platform benefits from most developers
> targetting it natively.
>
> Still, I'm very happy with amd64.  The performance should be significantly
> improved, and you benefit from features like NX and large memory support.
> I'm a bit of a tinkerer as well, so the occassional breakdown doesn't
> bother me as long as core apps are stable (such as samba/apache/etc -
> gotta keep the wife acceptance factor high and if the windows domain goes
> down it is an issue).
>
> If you're running a commercial server I wouldn't go anywhere near amd64
> unless it is just running a small set of core apps (like apache) and you
> expect to benefit from the improved performance.  On the other hand, if
> you're deploying a non-saturated general-purpose server you really should
> be going with something more stable (probably debian).
>
> Keep in mind that you can run x86 in a chroot just fine, and that is
> reasonably convenient for anything other than servers/daemons since they
> aren't running out of /etc/init.d.
>
> I'm guessing that if you're adventurous enough to be running gentoo in the
> first place you'll be fairly happy with amd64.  There are also lots of
> ways to contribute if you run amd64.  Just about all package developers
> who are running on x86 are happy to receive feedback from amd64 users,
> especially if you suggest patches (not that I personnally excel at this).
> In this way even a somewhat novice programmer can contribute to major
> projects in ways that some of the more senior developers cannot by virtue
> of having a different platform to test on.  I think you'll also find that
> amd64 has one of the largest groups of dedicated developers in gentoo, and
> the amd64 herd is probably larger than any comparable group on almost any
> distro...
>
> So, overall I'm very happy with amd64, even if it does mean fixing the
> occassional bug now and then.
>
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