AMD 64 stability

[Nathan Vidican]

Terry wrote:
> I need to build a new server to send down to the data centre for hosting 
> and possible game server type stuff.
> I have a ASUS 64 bit board and cpu spare so was considering using these 
> with amd64 version. But due to the data centre being 300 mile away i 
> thought i would check how you guys are finding it first :). Or shall i 
> play it safe and use the i386 i just can't decide
> 
> Ter
> 
> 
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I have been running the AMD64 branch for well into a year now. I've noted 
considerable issues while attempting to use AMD64 for a desktop, and would 
therefore not reccomend it for desktop use, (note some other replies mentioning 
nvidia driver, sound, raid, netcard, etc issues). That being said, as a server - 
it's rock solid.

We're running single and dual AMD Opteron boxen here, with 2+ gigs of ECC RAM. 
Accross the board we're standardized on 3Ware 9000-Series Escalades and Western 
Digital 'SD' (RAID-Edition) drives. These machines run OpenLDAP, MySQL, samba, 
Apache+mod_perl, Apache+mod_ssl, and a myriad of home-built applications written 
in Perl and C.

Baring some issues with nss_ldap, and more specifically the OpenLDAP libs prior 
to 2.2.x branch under FreeBSD 5.4/amd64... we've had no performance nor 
stability issues. All the servers here authenticate using nss_ldap, and pam_ldap 
to a central account server, which is something relatively new to FreeBSD in 
general (nss_ldap, pam_ldap only been able to work with FreeBSD reliably since 
the 5.x branches) - so I suspect our troubles even still were not amd64 specific.

I've got servers here running 100+ days of uptime, running 6.0/amd64 with SMP 
and booting from RAID volumes with NO issues. To me, that's as stable as I need 
to be. I've got some colocated stuff too, but the hardware is i386, so as-is the 
  O/S...

-- 
Nathan Vidican
nvidican at wmptl.com
Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
http://www.wmptl.com/