64 bit or 32 bit?

[Mike]

Yo.
I have searched but i didn't find any useful info other than that the srcds binaries is 32 bit. So, what's best? Srcds on 32bit or 64bit Debian?

[Nisd]

Only difference is how many servers you can host.

[BehaartesEtwas]

64 bit systems seem to be better at least for srcds, while for hlds you might still be better off with an 32 bit system. This is not actually related to the address space but probably due to other differences in the kernel.

[Mike]

Are there any "reasons" why 64 bit is better for SRCDS?

[Monk]

There are none. The syscalls are all 32bit, since srcds is 32bit. There may be subtle differences in the translation code in the kernel, but nothing that will make it 'better' or 'worse'

[Mike]

Alright, thanks for the answers!

[Mooga]

128 bit

[Terrorkarotte]

I would look at the ram for your question Ram >= 4Gb -> 64bit and Ram <= 4GB -> 32/64bit

If you are running Webspace with php too, i would go for 32bit since php uses more ram when it is under 64bit.

[BehaartesEtwas]

In my experience, srcds doesn't run so well on 32 bit systems. I checked this recently again, 64 bit was really superiour. I cannot explain why. But if you look at the menuconfig mask and compare 32 bit and 64 bit kernels you see many differences. That implicates more than only some subtile differences... If in doubt, try both.

Btw: the limit is not 4 GB of RAM for 32 bit, but 3 GB. The kernel uses 1 GB of address space for other purposes. And actually also 32 bit systems can use even more than 4 GB RAM (that's called high memory support IIRC), but that works more like swapping with RAM instead of disk space. This is not well suited for game servers!

Question: Is there any reason not to use 64 bit? (even if you have that php issue, you could simply use 32 bit php on a 64 bit system...)

[Mike]

Alright, I'm currently using the 32 bit version of debian.
It uses aprox 32 mb ram idle and 400mb when srcds is idling.

[Monk]

(01-21-2011, 06:39 PM)Terrorkarotte Wrote:  I would look at the ram for your question Ram >= 4Gb -> 64bit and Ram <= 4GB -> 32/64bit

If you are running Webspace with php too, i would go for 32bit since php uses more ram when it is under 64bit.

All programs use more memory on native 64 bit (long mode) because of swollen pointers/alignment issues (see below)

- a long double is normally 4 bytes on i386, but 16 bytes on amd64 (pretty big change)
- A pointer on x86/i386 will be 4 byte aligned, but on amd64/x86_64 it will be 8 bytes.
- doubles are normally 4 byte aligned on i386, but 8 bytes

[BehaartesEtwas]

err... a double is always 8 bytes, at least on gcc. and long double raised from 12 to 16 bits, but is so rarely used that you can probably forget about this. maybe the longer pointers increase the memory usage by a few percent, but if you have 4 GB RAM or more this will be strongly overcompensated by the additional RAM...

No, I don't think, it's a good idea to stick with an old technology longer than needed... It's only a question of time until the first distributions will only support 64 bit.

[Mike]

Ah, i remember when i had my first computer with Windows 98 or something.
Then XP came out, and that screwed my poor machine over...
So yea, i wouldn't use a old technology either.