64 bit performance

[netboy1977]

i am considerung to set up gentoo box as a webserver with apache and mysql for personal purposes...
how far can apache and mysql profit from 64 bit performance of an amd 64 system with 64 bit gentoo?

would you prefer my old dual pentium III or is an amd 64 faster in delivery? both have 1 gb ram.
i know that the answer depends on several factors... but can you give me some hints?

thanks!
dominik

[Dlareh]

The AMD64 will run circles around the dual P3.

But how many users do you have? If not very many, than I'd advise keeping the P3 as a "stable" box you don't monkey with much, and using the AMD64 for something more... exciting.

E: s/advice/advise
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[nevynxxx]

I would say that the fact that the amd64 will be a much faster processor than a PIII should answer that last question.

Of course it will be better.

Even in 32bit mode the AMD will be faster.

Looking at it another way. What hard drives are in there? If your talking web pages and small databases you want hard drives with tiny little seek times, which usually means high spin rates so usually SCSI or the WD Raptor, ( a scsi drive in a SATA box).

That much RAM will be fine in both cases unless you have a speficially large (i.e. >750MB) database, then more ram will help too.

The database design can have a big impact too.

So in order.....

1) look at hard drives, web pages are about serving lots of relativly small things, so fast drives, hardware raid all good yummy stuff.
2) look at database design, make it as efficent ass possible, and make sure the web page does none of the work, let the database do it all, it's been designed for that.....
3) look at the processor, of course a new processor will be faster, but it is the lowe3st concern in this list, unless you are doing very compolicated stuff with the database, and or serving lots of people.

Hell our work database servers 100 people, it has 10k SCSI drives on a 0+1 mirror and it is *still* bottlenecked at the disk before the processor. (Granted it has two hyperthreading Xeons but hey, they run at about 10% usage almost perminantly.)
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