[mythtv-users] any real performance advantage with 64bit OS?

[Andy Wettstein]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2008 at 03:18:13PM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> Subject says it all. I was wondering if it's *really* worth the effort 
> to install a 64 bit OS to gain some performance (lower CPU usage, more 
> stuff that the box can do).
> 
> System will record/play digital MPEG2 TV, both SD and HD, with an HDHR 
> tuner, to a plasma TV (probably HDMI).
> 
> If the gain is around 2% or so I'd rather install 32 bit (a known 
> quantity) and avoid any surprises. I don't plan to use weird codecs, 
> perhaps not even Flash, but if I do, those are know to work well on 32bit.

I have done some benchmarks.

AMD Phenom 9600:
http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=ajw-3221-31493-11066

I never bothered testing the 32 bit with the TLB fix disabled on this
machine, because 64 bit was convincingly faster.  There are are only a
few benchmarks that are affected by the TLB problems.

AMD Sempron 2800 @ 2 GHz:
http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=ajw-5746-10333-14188

Some of the 32 bit tests on this benchmark aren't valid, though.  Maybe
I should redo the 32 bit benchmark.

These were all running on Debian unstable.

So depending on the application there are definite performance increases
with 64 bit.

Now, if you'll notice the performance benefits with mythtv only machine 
I don't know.  I wish there was a mythcommflag benchmark, but that seems 
like it could be difficult to implement in a standalone benchmark suite.
Maybe just a complete mythtv benchmark test could be written.  I'm not
sure what that would test, though.

Flash works fine on 64 bit with nspluginwrapper.