🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <JGJ.95Sep27130629@rcx1.ssd.csd.harris.com>, jgj@ssd.csd.harris.com (Jeff Jackson) writes:

|> And they weren't too far off.  32-bits is sufficient for nearly all
|> applications and probably will remain so for a few more releases of
|> MicroSoft Windows. ;-)

Since many people also believe this, but with no humor ...

1) *Most* applications *are* perfectly happy in 32-bit, i.e.,
the statement above is true ... but easily misleading, because:

2) However, if you need 100 apps, and 99 of them are 32-happy, but
*1* of them needs 64-bit, then you
may want 64-bit, especially if that app is important to you.
In the recent 64-bit initiative, the ISVs who came to
participate in the press conference were {Oracle, Sybase, Informix} ...


3) AS noted in an earlier posting, memory-mapped files, and files with
holes, burn virtual memory pretty fast.  Some friends of ours created a
single 377GB file ... but I htink they just wrote & read it, rather than
mmaped it :-)  Some of this may seem crazy, but it is even applicable for
fairly modest-sized machines, i.e:
	a) You have time-series data collection, which may well leave
	   holes in the file.
	b) You have very large design data bases.
In either case, a system may want to map the whole file into memory, and
only page-in those pages actually referenced in response to an
interactive session.  On a large machine, you might get a large part of the
data into memory.  On a small desktop, you could run the same code, but
might only be able to get reasonable performance on a smaller part of the
data.  For instance, suppose your database is "Boeing 777": on *BIG*
machine, you get to see the whole thing at once ... on your desktop, maybe
you get one tray table :-)  The nice thing is that programming can be
relatively straightforward and repsonds to the simple addition of more physical
memory.  



-john mashey    DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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