[arch-general] A question about Arch Sixty Four

[b1]

On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 23:48 +0200, Frédéric Perrin wrote:
> Le lundi 24 à  0:29, C Anthony Risinger a écrit :
> > On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 12:02 AM, Keith Hinton <keithint1234 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I had a question about the sixty four bit port of Arch in general
> >> so figured this would be an okay place besides IRC to obtain any
> >> help I needed. I wanted to find out ruffly how much memory Arch
> >> sixty four will use for any program in general, regardless of
> >> GUI/console?
> >
> > i really don't think there is a way to answer this.  i'm not an expert
> > on hardware, but 64bit applies to the CPU, nothing else.  a larger
> > bottom level cache allows the CPU to view/consume more data/bits at
> > once, and to perform better on precision mathematics like heavy
> > floating point operations.  i don't see it having much-to-any effect
> > on RAM usage, but again maybe i'm missing something and then someone
> > will surely correct me :-)
> 
> On a 64 bit machine, in « char *p; », p will use 64 bits (8 bytes),
> instead of 4 bytes in a 32 bits machine [I'm talking about p, not about
> *p which doesn't look like it exists]. Gary Wright seems to be saying
> that the impact is negligible. Nicky726 seems to be saying that there
> is a difference of up to 80%. I am surprised by such a claim, but there
> seems to be anecdotes on Google of people seeing the same thing. As I
> don't have a 64 bits machine, I can't test for myself.
> 

This is really strange. I am running a 64 bit system and after a fresh
start (Including gnome, pulseaudio, dropbox,
rhythmbox,uget,transmission) it consumes between 700 and 800MB ram. I
never noticed any increase in ram usage between 32bit and 64bit (Have
been running a 32bit version of another distro before). 
Therefore I would suggest you using 64bit.

Greetings

Benedikt