Zach Rosenfield

SharePoint Program Manager, Infrastructure

Zach Rosenfield's SharePoint Blog > Posts > 64-Bit and the Admin Toolkit Download Trend

10/3/2008

64-Bit and the Admin Toolkit Download Trend

Just over a month ago I announced the release of the second Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit. We’ve been getting great feedback and lots of interest—and I wanted to share our download results:

Toolkit Download Trends

After 5 months we’re just shy of the 29,000 download mark, but more interesting is the disparity between x86 and x64 downloads. We feel like we often talk about the benefits of going 64-bit with your SharePoint deployments—but the download numbers above make us wonder if he advantages are really understood. I’ll take this opportunity to reiterate why we push all our customers to consider the switch to the x64 architecture.

What is wrong with 32-bit?
We’re not saying 32-bit is bad—it’s just that when Windows, IIS, CLR/ASP.NET, WSS, MOSS Core, SSP, and MDAC binaries are all loaded into memory (this is the initial footprint for MOSS 2007) it can leave a 32-bit address space quite fragmented (not to be confused with “too consumed”). When the CLR or SharePoint services request new memory blocks, it can be difficult to find a 64MB slice in the already loaded address space. Below is a snapshot of such an address space:

Sample Memory Footprint (32-Bit)

In many cases where customers are seeing bad performance—it’s not due to a lack of memory but a lack of enough continuous memory to serve additional requests.

Why 64 Can Help?
64-bit is not a cure-all to every performance issue but it does provide a practically unbounded address space for user mode processes. Therefore memory requests (even in 100’s of MB chunks) will not fail due to a lack of un-fragmented space. Not only will 64-bit significantly lower the problems you could potentially face, but once you get your servers into a constantly stable state mitigating other performance issues becomes a much easier task to achieve.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in the SharePoint Administration Toolkit and to remind you all to keep the benefits of 64-bit architecture in mind as you look to improve your SharePoint deployments and plan for the future. If you can’t switch immediately (and even if you can) you can still help yourself today by installing the Infrastructure Update and to look at the Best Practices Resource Center.

Zach Rosenfield
Program Manager, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Posted at 12:07 PM by Zach (SharePoint - MSFT) | Category: SharePoint Administration; Random SharePoint Knowledge | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (5)

Comments

Re: 64-Bit and the Admin Toolkit Download Trend

Hi Zach,
I think most of the downloads are probably for evaluation purposes which will be run on Virtual PC/Server and hence the higher 32bit download rate..

at 10/3/2008 12:48 PM

Re: 64-Bit and the Admin Toolkit Download Trend

Everybody downloads for 32bit VPC's\evaluations - then we see it's not so helpful, so we don't bother to download the 64bit...
Give us some real admin tools, like 3rd party sell!

at 10/5/2008 1:03 PM

PSS Support for x64 blows

Hey Zach,

Sorry to say, but PSS support blows for SharePoint on x64, at least it did for pre SP1. I spent over a year on the phone with MS on issue after issue with MOSS x64 all with bugs like memory leaks, crashes, etc, there was well over 10 different cases created and numerous hotfixes created for me. Not one case was caused by a configuration or machine issue.

PSS told me to stop using x64 because they lack the tools such as debugdiag to properly debug the bugs in the program.

After wasting a year trying to resolve the issues, I flattened the farm and brought it all back up with 32bit front ends, and 64bit sql backends and had it all going in less than 1/2 a day.

I will not be bringing any x64 nodes into this farm with this version because of the issues experienced. Hopefully the code is better in 2008 and support has the tools they need.

at 10/7/2008 12:30 PM

Because MS's own support for x64 is horrible

Yes, these are the benefits of x64 and why I much prefer to do things on x64 whenever possible. However, Microsoft continues to make this hard. As the pointed out, even the install of SharePoint on x64 is not really supported. The latest SDK for WSS and MOSS v1.4 from 2 months back (8/28/2008) doesn't even work on an x64 development. Even if I wanted to just have the IDE on x64 and have the sites live on an x86 system, I can't even load the lbiraries and templates in x64.

Before you start griping to the community about how they aren't using x64 enough, perhaps ya'll should get your in-house development and support platforms up to date to allow people to use x64.

Personally, as an admin/dev, I'm going to bother managing a system on a platform that I can't even do basic code lookups for looking at the app.

at 10/20/2008 1:23 PM

sharepoint

its very great article from this users can get more knowledge still most of ppl dnt know about sharepoint and its important. Keep it up! :)

at 12/2/2008 5:14 AM

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