[Novalug] mint debian adventures

Jon LaBadie novalugml@jgcomp.com
Thu Feb 5 14:16:58 EST 2015


On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 12:58:14AM -0500, Bonnie Dalzell via Novalug wrote:
> LMDE 64 bit lacks a repository for ia32-libs. When you try to get them from
> a repository you get a message about them being deprecated.
> 
> I have a lot of space on my computer so I did a 32 bit install of Linux Mint
> Debian Cinnamon and Kintraks runs on my 4 core computer (using one core) but
> it is rather slow in uploading my index. and has hung up a couple of times.
> I am making notes and am going to send them to the author.
> 
> I wonder if he recompiled it for 64 bit if it would be faster. i am going to
> ask him.
> 
> I have had my best results with the Xubuntu 12.04 64 bit install and the 64
> bit install of Linux Mint Mate (not debian).
> 
> Am going to write the author about that also.
> 
> The Kintraks program has some nicely thought out features but it does have
> trouble handling my imported 44,000 dog database.

I had a problem at one client related to 32/64 bit, memory,
and swap.  They called me (acting as an "as needed" admin)
to increase the amount of swap available to their main
application (a CAD for circuit board design).  I gladly
did that, but also analyzed their problem and swap was
not going to fix it.

The client was running 32bit systems, lots of memory,
8GB on each desktop using a PAE kernel (needed to
access > 4GB memory on 32bit systems) and even before
I increased swap, they had 8 or 16GB of swap.

The problem was the 32bit memory limitation to an
individual process.  Depending on the kernel this
was generally 3 or 3.5GB max proc size.  The rest
of memory up to the 32bit limit was for the kernel.

The PAE kernel and swap, let them run 'more' processes
of 3.5GB limit programs, but did not let the individual
processes get larger than that limit.

The staff didn't bump up against the limit during most
activities, like editing the design, or rendering a
small section of the design.  But when they ran the
same program to render the entire board, taking many
hours, the program aborted with out of memory messages.

The client's solution was to buy a single high performance
64bit system to use a a "compute engine".  When a large
run was needed, they ssh'ed to the compute engine and
ran the program there.  Their home and data dirs were
available on both machines (nfs) so no transfers of data
and results were needed.

Not only did it stop the crashes, but it completed in
about an hour instead of overnight.  A big surprise to
them was the software licensing.  Their vendor licensed
the 32 and 64bit versions separately.  And it wasn't
cheap, but like $200,000.

I doubt that your software, recompiled for 64bit would
execute any faster.  By that I mean execute the individual
instructions faster.  But other things about the environ-
ment of 64bits could make it faster on the wall clock.
The program may keep the data it is working on in memory
and if it runs out of memory, it may save data on disk.
Later when it needs those data again you have more disk
activity.  The 64bit version might not have that type
of problem.  This assumes there is a good bit of memory
available for the 64bit version to use.

Jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  novalugml@jgcomp.com
 11226 South Shore Rd		(703) 787-0688 (H)
 Reston, VA  20190		(703) 935-6720 (C)



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