OS: RAM difference between Ubuntu x86 (32 bit with physical address) and Ubuntu x64 (64 bit)

Posted on 05. Oct, 2009 by Dragos in Operating Systems, Ubuntu

The first ever version of Ubuntu I have installed on my computer was Hardy Heron 8.04 (x64/64 bit). As time passed and new versions appeared, I have upgraded to the latest version of Intrepid Ibex 8.10. As a web developer, It happens sometimes to run an excessive number of simultaneous applications at a time, which leads to a huge RAM consumption. Back then (still the x64 version) 2GB of ram was not enough, only Netbeans consumed 1GB of RAM and Firefox – about 800MB. Sometimes my computer got frozen and hampered myself from doing my job without interruptions. So I added another 2GB of RAM (totaling 4GB). With that amount, my PC worked very well, better than ever (even though hibernating my PC was taking ages). Unfortunately, while upgrading to Jaunty Jackalope, it happened a crash during the process, which lead to a total loss of information on my hard-disk (and yes I didn’t backup my data ). The second times I’ve considered to install Jaunty Jackalope 9.04, but this time the 32 bit version. I was very surprised to notice that while running the same number of programs (at the same time!), only the 75th part of RAM from the amount of RAM used on the 64 bit system was used on the x86 version. I was even more surprised to see that while on the 64 system Firefox had the stupid habit of eating too much RAM (~800MB in best cases), on the 32 bit system, Firefox is using only 120MB of RAM, even though it’s fully loaded with heavy Javascripted websites (Digg, Facebook or Mashable). So, when you doubt of whether to install Ubuntu x86 or x64, keep in mind that the x64 version will deplete your RAM resources. But, from my experience, the x64 version works much, much faster on dual core processors than the x86 version (and that’s the only advantage I am currently missing). Also keep in mind that if you have more than 3GB installed in your PC, you will have to install the Physical Address extension from the Synaptic Package Manager, cause if you don’t do it, the system will recognize only ~3.4GB of RAM from the total amount of RAM.

                    
                    

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