Ron Johnson wrote:
On 12/09/08 03:49, kj wrote:Anoop Aryal wrote:It will make all the difference on a box with 16GB. On a 32bit machine, you can use a PAE enabled kernel to allow the operating system to address all the memory, but you're still stuck with a 4GB per-process limit, which means if this will be a dedicated MySQL server, you're wasting 12GB of memory.Just curious, how big of a difference (indeed, what difference) does 64bit make?Why wouldn't Linux use that 12GB for applications and (more importantly) as a really big read cache?
If the box is a dedicated DB server, then there aren't (shouldn't be) any other applications running other than the essentials. Of curse the kernel would do what the kernel does, but it makes more sense to have MySQL use that memory for caches/buffers dedicated to its own purposes, for example, caching query results. So again, the per-process memory limit is a disadvantage.