To 64 bit or not to 64 bit.

64 bit has some advantages and disadvantages compared to 32 bit.
+ possible to address more than 4GB RAM
+ better performance with various tools
- not all applications are 64 bit available
- more RAM space used due larger pointers and data types

Well, well, lets see what it does in general usage…

The following tests were executed on an identical 32 bit Ubuntu 9.10 and a 64 bit Ubuntu 9.10 setup:
- Boot speed from grub to the desktop with bootchart
- Copy a file (888MB) from and to an external HDD
- The same as above but copy from and to a Truecrypt container
- Compress and decompress a directory (333.5MB, 31’000 files) with tar-gzip and tar-bzip2
- Encrypt and decrypt a tar archive (348.8MB) with OpenSSL (AES-256-CBC)
- Encrypt and decrypt the same archive with GPG (DSA/ELG-E 4096)
- Encode a wav audio file (96.8MB) to mp3 and ogg with Lame and OggEnc
- Encode a wmv (71.5MB) and avi-xvid (253.8MB) Video file to mkv-x264 with mencoder
- Benchmark blender.test with Blender
- Benchmark various Nexuiz demos
- Compile the 2.6.31-15 kernel

Test conditions were:
- time command to measure the exact duration (except Nexuiz and Blender benchmark)
- Run every test 3 times or more (except kernel compilation)
- sync systemcalls to clear memory before tests

Test Machine specs:
- Asus P5K Pro P35
- Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.6Ghz
- Kingston 2GB RAM
- Samsung SATA 320GB 7200rpm
- GeForce 8600GT 256MB

Versions:
- Kernel: 2.6.31-14
- Bootchart: 0.90.2
- Truecrypt: 6.3
- VirtualBox: 3.0.8
- OpenSSL: 0.9.8
- GPG: 1.4.9
- Lame: 3.98.2
- Vorbis-tools (OggEnc): 1.2.0
- Mencoder: 1.0
- Blender: 2.49
- Nexuiz: 2.5.2
- gcc: 4.4.1

Now, the charts:

Startup speed measured with bootchart

Copy a file (888MB) to and from an external USB 2.0 HDD
Copy to HDD                                                                   Copy from HDD

Copy a file (888MB) to and from a Truecrypt container lying on the external USB 2.0 HDD
Copy to TC container                                                       Copy from TC container

Not a real difference

Compress and decompress a directory (333.5MB, 31’000 files) with tar and gzip
Compress                                                                        Decompress

Compress and decompress a directory (333.5MB, 31’000 files) with tar and bzip2
Compress                                                                        Decompress

64 bit for compression, 32 bit for decompression

Encrypt and decrypt a tar archive (348.8MB) with OpenSSL AES-256-CBC
Encrypt                                                                            Decrypt

Encrypt and decrypt a tar archive (348.8MB) with GPG DSA/ELG-E 4096 bit Key
Encrypt                                                                            Decrypt

As you can see, encryption profits from 64 bit (except Truecrypt copy processes)

Encode a raw wav audio file (96.8MB) to mp3 with Lame

Encode a raw wav audio file (96.8MB) to ogg with OggEnc

Overall better audio encoding with 64 bit

Encode a wmv video file (71.5MB) to mkv (x264 codec) with mencoder

Encode a avi (xvid codec) video file (253.8MB) to mkv (x264 codec) with mencoder

XviD 1 : 0 WMV

Blender benchmark with the test.blend file

Heavily based on CPU usage

Nexuiz benchmark with the demos 1, 3, 5, average frames per second over all three demos

Tested with this open source game, may be different on closed source games

Kernel 2.6.31-15 compilation time with the ‘make menuconfig’ .config file

A bit more than 2 minutes between the two architectures on about an hour of compilation

The tar.gz, tar.bz2 and blender test were also run inside a VirtualBox Ubuntu 9.10 32 bit environment
on both setups, but with no notable difference

Well, except for a few tests, 64 bit made the race.

Why not give Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit a try?