Re: Linux v.s. Mac OS-X Performance

On Mon, Nov 12, 2007 at 05:02:52PM -0500, Vivek Khera wrote:
> On Nov 12, 2007, at 12:29 PM, Sam Mason wrote:
> >You only need a 64bit address space when each process wants to see
> >more than ~3GB of RAM.
>
> And how exactly do you get that on a 32-bit CPU?

I didn't mean to suggest you could. You can actually hack around it by
performing various kernel specific tricks (mmap()ing different parts of
a large file works under some Unixes) but it's a lot of work and tends
to be difficult and brittle.

> Even with PAE
> (shudders from memories of expanded/extended RAM in the DOS days), you
> still have a 32-bit address space per-process.

Yes, if you've got several clients connected they can each have their
3GB address space in RAM and not swapped out, or you have have lots of
disk cache. Other people can probably comment on what life is actually
on a box like this, I've not had much experience.

Sam