Is 64bit Vista that much faster? | The Coffeehouse

ya so I just discovered this laptop has a 64bit processor and I'm running 32bit vista .... worth upgrading? [A]

There's not much speed difference, only worth upgrading if you have 4GB or more RAM or if you expect to be running a lot of native 64 bit apps (and there are very few of those).

typemismatch

yeah I only have 2G of Ram but I could go to 4 I guess ...

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop

typemismatch wrote:

yeah I only have 2G of Ram but I could go to 4 I guess ...

on laptops? way too expensive if you consider that you would probably also have to replace previous ram banks since most recent laptops have all the memory slots used. unless you use a lot of virtual machines or high-end games you should be fine with 2. the real advantage with 4 is that you can turn off the swapfile that vista and XP love to use even when there's a lot of free ram

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop

yes it is unless you have only 1Gb of ram since Vista x64 wastes 250 more megabytes of ram than the 32bit counterpart. if you have only 1Gb installing x64 wouldn't be a good idea because a clean vista x86 install uses about 600mb of ram so you'd be left with only 150mb of free ram

typemismatch

yeah I just looked up the cost of memory only to discover the machine won't actually take more than 2G .... o well Smiley

Jason Cox

I've never noticed an overall increase in the speed of the OS itself, but for some x64 apps, Crysis for example, there's about a 15% performance boost on x64 systems.

DigitalDud

Nah, in general performance is worse since programs compiled for x64 are larger and require more memory, and are less likely to fit in the cache.

DigitalDud

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:

the real advantage with 4 is that you can turn off the swapfile that vista and XP love to use even when there's a lot of free ram

Removing the paging file is one of those stupid "OMG TWEAK YOUR COMPUTER FOR SPEED" myths that float around the Internet. In truth it just ruins performance because all the idle memory pages are forced to stay in RAM and you end up with no room for cache or prefetching. And now any program with a memory leak can hose your system.

The system uses the paging file at all times for good reasons, it's not to spite you. Memory management in Windows has actually changed a lot since 1992, you might want to read up on it.

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop

DigitalDud wrote:

Removing the paging file is one of those stupid "OMG TWEAK YOUR COMPUTER FOR SPEED" myths that float around the Internet. In truth it just ruins performance because all the idle memory pages are forced to stay in RAM and you end up with no room for cache or prefetching. And now any program with a memory leak can hose your system.

The system uses the paging file at all times for good reasons, it's not to spite you. Memory management in Windows has actually changed a lot since 1992, you might want to read up on it.

I keep my PCs turned on 24/7 and windows, both Vista and XP, kept swapping on disk despite having 8, yes, 8Gb of ram and never used more than 4. during the night something was being swapped to disk and every morning when I started using my PC that was left on all the night the applications that I left open before going to bed every now and then would hang for a few instants during which the swapped pages were being loaded from disk. and all this was caused by page faults, that I could clearly see on the task manager.

after I removed the swapfile it never happened again so actually it isn't a myth like many think: no matter how much ram you could put in a system windows will still use the swap file, no matter what you do, until you get rid of it.

Sven Groot

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:

and all this was caused by page faults, that I could clearly see on the task manager.

Many things besides having to load pages from disk can cause page faults.

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:
no matter how much ram you could put in a system windows will still use the swap file

That's true. It's a good thing.

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop

Sven Groot wrote:

Many things besides having to load pages from disk can cause page faults.

when the applications keeps running, you see the task manager page faults counter increase by 1 and at the same time see the application hanging and the disk loading it's hard to believe it's not a a page fault caused by swapping, especially when you disable the swapfile and it never happens again

Sven Groot wrote:

That's true. It's a good thing.

when the system can't correctly decide what the keep in memory and what to swap on the disk no, it's not

Sven Groot

Windows will lazily page applications to disk, moving pages from the applications working set to the standby set. These pages are not removed from memory (i.e. they are not moved to the free set) unless the physical frame used by this page is needed for something else. The lazy write-back is done simply so that at the time the frame is needed, it will already be on the disk so it won't have to be written then.

If you are seeing pages actually being removed from memory while the system is idle, something really memory intensive must be causing this. It may have something to do with superfetch or readyboost, I don't know. Windows is known to be over-agressive when it comes to the file cache, causing applications to be paged out when you copy a large file (Vista does this less than XP but it still exists). Obviously this wouldn't happen if you disable the pagefile because it would have less space to use for caching.

I leave my PC on while I'm away same as you and do not notice any slowdowns when I return.

Also, 1 pagefault equals 1 page which is typically 4KB in size. You wouldn't notice any delays loading a single page unless the disk is incredibly busy already or has to come out of sleep mode. So you should be seeing hundreds or thousands of pagefaults to get the behaviour you describe.

punkouter

Sven Groot wrote:

I leave my PC on while I'm away same as you and do not notice any slowdowns when I return.

...only it gets freezed right?.. LOL just kiddin, sorry man cant help it. Tongue Out

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop

Sven Groot wrote:

If you are seeing pages actually being removed from memory while the system is idle, something really memory intensive must be causing this. It may have something to do with superfetch or readyboost, I don't know. Windows is known to be over-agressive when it comes to the file cache, causing applications to be paged out when you copy a large file (Vista does this less than XP but it still exists). Obviously this wouldn't happen if you disable the pagefile because it would have less space to use for caching.

then it could be superfetch that preloads applications depending on the system time causing pages being swapped to disk. I've however seen this behaviour on XP too so it could also be something else

Sven Groot wrote:

I leave my PC on while I'm away same as you and do not notice any slowdowns when I return.

maybe because you don't leave memory intensive applications running when you're not using the system. I've seen this behaviour on a lot of different hardware so I know it's not just my system config

Sven Groot wrote:

Also, 1 pagefault equals 1 page which is typically 4KB in size. You wouldn't notice any delays loading a single page unless the disk is incredibly busy already or has to come out of sleep mode. So you should be seeing hundreds or thousands of pagefaults to get the behaviour you describe.

it usually increases by single units but it happens quite often in fact I see the interface freezing for instants every time it happens. it probably doesn't happen with many pages at once because I have plenty of rams so not only contiguous pages are swapped to disk

Sven Groot

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:

maybe because you don't leave memory intensive applications running when you're not using the system. I've seen this behaviour on a lot of different hardware so I know it's not just my system config

You wouldn't happen to use Azureus, do you? For some reason it polutes the file cache something terrible so that would definitely cause the behaviour you describe. It might happen with other BitTorrent or file sharing clients too, I don't know, but it definitely happens with Azureus. It's one of the main reasons I switched to uTorrent (which doesn't seem to have that problem).

punkouter

Sven Groot wrote:

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote: maybe because you don't leave memory intensive applications running when you're not using the system. I've seen this behaviour on a lot of different hardware so I know it's not just my system config

You wouldn't happen to use Azureus, do you? For some reason it polutes the file cache something terrible so that would definitely cause the behaviour you describe. It might happen with other BitTorrent or file sharing clients too, I don't know, but it definitely happens with Azureus. It's one of the main reasons I switched to uTorrent (which doesn't seem to have that problem).

it does? im using azureus too, but never had that kind of problem....(or maybe im just not paying attention??)

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop

Sven Groot wrote:

You wouldn't happen to use Azureus, do you? For some reason it polutes the file cache something terrible so that would definitely cause the behaviour you describe. It might happen with other BitTorrent or file sharing clients too, I don't know, but it definitely happens with Azureus. It's one of the main reasons I switched to uTorrent (which doesn't seem to have that problem).

no, I hate installing the JRE. its update system that always leaves the previous versions still installed is pure evil

Amiga forever!

DigitalDud wrote:

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop said:

the real advantage with 4 is that you can turn off the swapfile that vista and XP love to use even when there's a lot of free ram

Removing the paging file is one of those stupid "OMG TWEAK YOUR COMPUTER FOR SPEED" myths that float around the Internet. In truth it just ruins performance because all the idle memory pages are forced to stay in RAM and you end up with no room for cache or prefetching. And now any program with a memory leak can hose your system.

The system uses the paging file at all times for good reasons, it's not to spite you. Memory management in Windows has actually changed a lot since 1992, you might want to read up on it.

I strongly disagree! I have 16GB of RAM. You can use the swap file if you want but please don't spread FUD. Anyone with 4GB+ RAM should remove the swap file.

PerfectPhase

Sven Groot wrote:

Windows is known to be over-agressive when it comes to the file cache, causing applications to be paged out when you copy a large file (Vista does this less than XP but it still exists).

Yes, the FileCopyEx in vista SP0 uses non cached IO so shouldn't clobber the memory like XP does, though it has be changed back to cached IO in SP1, not sure this is a good thing, just means the file copy dialog closes sooner. Linkage

stun

Amiga forever! wrote:

I strongly disagree! I have 16GB of RAM. You can use the swap file if you want but please don't spread FUD. Anyone with 4GB+ RAM should remove the swap file.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/15/vista_workshop/

Tom's Hardware did a test with 8GB RAM and shrinking the swap file down to 16MB (smallest possible allowed).
They claim it still works fine...but if it is lower than 8GB, the OS a bit unstable.

But is it a good idea at all (or) not?
Personally, I don't think it might be a good idea to do it even with 8GB.
At least leave some considerable amount of swap file size.

My question is do we get any performance gain from it at all?
Can someone from Microsoft answer this?

magicalclick

I am using Vista64 desktop with 2GB RAM. If you don't have a dedicated memory for graphics, you will be using about 50%, which is like 1GB. If you have a dedicated memory for GPU, it is about 33% 660MB.

In order word, 2GB is well enough for Vista64 Ultimate.
Anyway, technically 64bits is slower than 32bits because it needs to process more stuff. Image you have a really primitive ADD operation on 32bits CPU, it would take 32 cycles to do this, and 64bits would take 64 cycles to do this. Of course they made it all just one cycle for ADD operator (using more circuits), or the CPU manufactures should be hanged. But when you get to floating point multiplication or something more complex, the performance will be sacrificed when there is not enough space for the extra circuits.

The key about 64bit is that you get more RAM without hacking OS to use that extra few hidden bits from 32bits CPU; very dangerous as well.

My suggestion is don’t upgrade. You get 64bits OS that comes with the computer. No need to upgrade.

DigitalDud

YearOfTheLinuxDesktop wrote:

I keep my PCs turned on 24/7 and windows, both Vista and XP, kept swapping on disk despite having 8, yes, 8Gb of ram and never used more than 4. during the night something was being swapped to disk and every morning when I started using my PC that was left on all the night the applications that I left open before going to bed every now and then would hang for a few instants during which the swapped pages were being loaded from disk. and all this was caused by page faults, that I could clearly see on the task manager.

after I removed the swapfile it never happened again so actually it isn't a myth like many think: no matter how much ram you could put in a system windows will still use the swap file, no matter what you do, until you get rid of it.

Windows trims the working set of processes that are idle, especially if they're minimized. Vista is a bit smarter about this, but you have can't expect the operating system to really understand your work habits very well. It doesn't know the difference between some service running that is never used and a program that is idle for hours, they're just idle processes.

Now here's the kicker, if you disable the paging file, you are NOT preventing memory pages from getting pushed back to disk. Paging is a fundamental part of how the memory manager works, how files are loaded from disk, and how program code is loaded into memory.

You are only preventing the OS from paging out data allocated by programs, it still will page out program