Anyone using a 64 bit OS on their server?
 

I installed FreeSBD amd64 recently (which despite the name is also for Intel processors) and was impressed. I never realised that it was a "tier 1" version, which basically means that it's expected to be stable and frequently updated like the 32 bit version. The only issue I had was with the onboard ethernet and occasional garbled packets but considering it was a Realtek chip (ie: usually crap) I wrote it off and installed an Intel PCI/X ethernet card in its place. Apart from that - and a different directory for compiling - it's virtually identical to its older 32 bit brother.

The mainboard itself only supports a maximim of 8GB but it's still nice to see more than the typical 3.5GB available...

(mysql is the reason I tried this OS. Under FreeBSD 32 bit the maximum memory I can get it to use is just under 2GB.)

I use MySQL on Linux/64. I have never had an issue; actually, for many operations it is visibly faster.

I have never tried FreeBSD/64 (other than on an UltraSparc 5, which was awful.).

I noticed that even with 4GB RAM (which I had been using under 32 bit) there was about 350-400MB of extra available RAM when FreeBSD amd64 was booted. I wonder if that ~10% benefit would be killed off by everything using 64 bit pointers. :Graucho

We have 2 FreeBSD 6.2 servers running the 64bit os.. I'm not technical enough to tell what's different

One thing that's driving me nuts though, please help:

We have a dual processor machine, each processor has 2 cores, so 4 cores.

If I'm running one process, it only gets to 25% CPU, as shown in top.

If I run 2 or more concurrent processes, it only gets to 50%.

I want it to use 100% CPU no matter how many processes it's running, even one. This machine is supposed to be used as a workhorse.

How? :)

Each process can only consume 100% of CPU per core, which in your case works out to be 25% server-wide. The only way to use more CPU is to have a multithreaded application. What app are you using?

FreeBSD 7 FTW!!! Gotta love the TCP/IP stack improvements. And yes FBSD AMD64 is solid.

rowan: as far as memory capacity issues check out http://www.metaram.com/ "The memory solution capable of closing the gap between processing power and memory density, and improving the performance of Servers and Workstations!"

I installed 7.0 on this box because I read it was better at scheduling. I wouldn't normally take the risk of installing a "point zero" release but since I was going for amd64 for the first time I thought I may as well make it a double whammy. :) It's a dedicated mysql box that is used for background processing so it's not mission critical... I wouldn't be so free and keen to try that on one of my production servers...

I agree with your wariness, and I would never recommend rolling out a new deployment without having thoroughly stress tested it first. What's your first impressions? So far I am quite impressed. Granted I am a bit of a *BSD* zealot, I am as usual, quite happy with the progress FreeBSD has made.

I must confess to not really doing any sort of methodical stress or performance testing so far, but I can say that the server is quite happily handling a database with over half a billion rows of data. The only issue is that if I set mysql's key_buffer value larger than about 4985M it seems to "wrap" and drops down to 900MB size. I don't think it's a FreeBSD issue (eg a per-process limit) because increasing the size of other buffers increases the total memory that mysql uses. Anyway, it's not a big worry since I can't expand the RAM further with the current mainboard, but it's something to keep in mind for the future.

Oh but you *can* expand the ram with your current mobo! Check out www.metaram.com like I was saying!

I did check it out, but I don't have a Xeon motherboard, or "less than $50,000" :winkwink:

Oi. That's cornball, man. Great emoticon for it!

I really need to take a serious look into FreeBSD, again. I was very unimpressed with the initial v5 and v6, but then again, the .zero to .two releases have been pretty shithouse for the last couple.. :(

mencoder

I'm not familiar with that but I did a quick search and came up with something that may help, try adding "threads=4" to the options part of the commandline.

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/...ry/004960.html

I'm still pissed that I bought a PR440FX because Jordy told me he was working on SMP. Did that ever happen (in that computer's lifetime)? Nooooooooo.