Ubuntu 32 bit Vs 64 bit

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aaronr76

68 posts

Master Geek

#86243 4-Jul-2011 14:14

hi,
I am wondering has anybody notice a boost in performance with the 64 bit in comparison to the 32,
I'm tossing up weather its worth getting the 64 bit, id love to hear you opinions.

ScottStevensNZ

245 posts

Master Geek

#489203 4-Jul-2011 15:30

aaronr76: hi,
I am wondering has anybody notice a boost in performance with the 64 bit in comparison to the 32,
I'm tossing up weather its worth getting the 64 bit, id love to hear you opinions.

Not sure for ubuntu 64 as I am running 32 however the rule of thumb for other O/S's is that there won't be a performance boost, but you will be able to access more than 4GB (4096MB) RAM which if you are doing image editing or something very RAM intensive is a good thing.

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toyonut

1508 posts

Uber Geek

#490299 6-Jul-2011 21:51

I never noticed a difference in speed on my laptop, but I am only using 2Gb of ram. It did make it more difficult to get drivers for wireless and sound though, so have a google to see if your components are supported.

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alexx

867 posts

Ultimate Geek

#490315 6-Jul-2011 22:15

If you use a 32bit linux kernel with PAE support, you can utilise more than 4GB of memory, but no single process can access more than 4GB. There might also be some file size limits and filesystem limits that you could run into, but it's mainly people running servers that need to worry about these.

For example: in RHEL5 if there are any 32-bit machines in the cluster, the maximum gfs file system size is 16TB. If all machines in the cluster are 64-bit, the maximum size is 8EB.

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/

People running big database servers and other applications that access huge disk/ram need to worry about such things. Most of the rest of us don't. Having said that, there will soon come a time when 64 bit is the norm for desktop/laptop and 32 bit is for mobile devices.

andrenz

17 posts

Geek
Inactive user

#491882 11-Jul-2011 09:40

it says "32-bit recommended" when you choose what version to download, that always scared me off trying 64-bit , i mean if ubuntu it's self doesn't have faith in there own 64-bit version i definitely don't. linux needs to step up ther 64-bit game, modern fully featured distributions like ubuntu (as opposed to puppy linux, dsl etc) should more or less drop there 32-bit versions in my opinion, it's been years since a "32-bit only" cpu has been manufactured

marpada

475 posts

Ultimate Geek

#492056 11-Jul-2011 13:51

Although it has improved a bit in the last few years, the 64bits implementation of some popular non-free software like the Adobe Flash plugin or Skype is lagged and sub-standard, that's why 32bits editions are recommended for new users.
You won't get a noticeable speed increase with 64bits in day to day desktop tasks, but there's some in CPU intensive tasks as video encoding, file compression,etc.
You can find some good reviews in the Phoronix site, for example http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_natty_pae64

spacerace

7 posts

Wannabe Geek

#495137 19-Jul-2011 09:36

It's best to stick to 32 bit for now unless you have a use case which requires (or would greatly benefit from) a 64 bit system.

I have not had any problems with core Ubuntu running in 64 bit - but as mentioned earlier when using 3rd party programs/extensions it's a different story.