Neither is better than the other. I continue to use both and find both to be of good value. Linode gives you more bang for your buck for sure. With slicehost you know you have Rackspace behind the company so there is peace of mind, plus they have backups and nifty iphone apps.

Well, Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038 GMT is when time_t (32bit) rolls over.

I really hope I'm not working then; Y2K was sufficiently boring; don't want to have to deal with both of them.

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

Since other companies are starting to support ipv6 I think it would be great for linode to start supporting this in Dallas and Fremont...

As a workaround, you can use a tunnel. There are tunnel servers near all of the data centers.

I wonder the same. The only reason I can think of is that 32 bit uses a bit less memory.

That's the only reason, but it's kind of an important one. Memory is the first resource you're likely to run out of pretty much regardless of what you're doing with your linode.

Alternate question: is there any reason to pick a 64-bit OS?

I'm guessing that when people say "the 64-bit OS is 'faster'" they're talking about the increase (doubling?) of general purpose registers available in 64-bit mode. This would be one reason.

I've noticed that 64-bit is also "faster" because the distros compile it against the newer processors. So instead of compiling against an ancient i386, they are compiled for x86_64 with better optimizations.

I don't know if it's so little.

My PHP processes (fastcgi) dropped from a max of ~60MB per process to ~35MB each when I went from 64 bit to 32 bit.

I'm not sure why the drop was so dramatic; it's Ubuntu Jaunty's release of php5 (I don't recall the version offhand) + APC (32MB cache).

Most other processes also shrunk, but not by very much.

The question isn't "Is there any reason to not pick the 64 bit OS?", but "Is there any reason to pick the 64 bit OS?"

64-bit gives you higher memory usage, and if you have under 4GB of RAM, few benefits if any. I don't think there's really anything a typical server does that would get a speed boost from 64-bit computing.

Great link, thanks. To sum it up: it depends on what you do with your Linode. 64-bit can be twice as fast in some operations, but more or less the same in others.

Note that the referenced page doesn't cover memory usage at all (as earlier highlighted in this thread), which can easily trump CPU gains in a general purpose host, especially in a VPS environment where memory is far more constrained, and overflowing to disk a much higher penalty in terms of performance.

-- David

grsecurity only works in pv_grub-64, it will segfault on pv_grub-32.