I was reading a recent post by Jeff Atwood about how he had a new virtual server for his blog, and how one of his requirements was a 64bit OS. Jeff provided a link to an article from 2005 on the Microsoft Operations blog that makes a case for using 64bit OS’s on servers. I have always thought that conventional wisdom has said that if you do not need more then 4GB of ram, you don’t need a 64bit OS, and the hassles that go along with it. Apparently, the ability to have a larger virtual address pool offers significant improvements to performance for web applications.

The article, written in 2005, shows some relative performance comparisons between x86 and x64 measured in responses per second, and response time. The requests per second are pretty close, with one category (static) performing better on x86, but the differences in response time are phenomenal. Aside from raw performance numbers, it was noted that Worker Processes recycled less, which would lead to improved end user experience. It was also noted that asp.net 1.1 is only available in 32bit, but that there was no problems in running it on a 64bit OS, and that the 2.0 version of the framework has a 64 bit version.

The biggest issues faced by the operations team (in 2005), was making sure their 3rd party app's like AV and Backup, and any drivers, were 64bit compatible. I'm hoping 2 years later, this is slightly better.

We are just starting to get some servers up for our new project and the question of 32 vs 64 bit has come up. Normally I'd be all about the latest and greatest 64bit goodness, but IT is always wanting to take the conservative approach. However they've agreed to go 64bit OS for the DB servers for sure, so I don't know what the difference is between those servers and the web servers, should be the same as far as AV, backup and drivers are concerned. We'll see how it goes.

Jeff also provide a link to another Microsoft Operations post about the free log parser provided by Microsoft.