On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 12:37:22PM -0400, Mario Bertrand wrote: > I have successfully install debian with sid-amd64-monolithic.iso on my > second ide (+kernel 2.6.8-3) and I don't see much difference in the > performance vs i386 sarge (+kernel 2.6.8-1) on my first ide. It is > normal? Should I expect more? Someone told me that I should buy a new > hard drive with more cache (8M) to take benefit of faster cpu. > > hda - 2048k cache - 3923.96 BogoMIPS / i386 > hdb - 69k cache - 3932.16 "" / amd64
As long as your disk access is not cpu bound, the speed of the HD determines the speed of the HD. If you wanter faster disk acces, buy a faster disk. The cache size on the disk can help, but it doesn't change the underlying rotation speed of the disk or the number of bits per rotation on the disk. It does help a bit under normal use for most people though, and 8M caches are easy to find (with 16M starting to appear). But yeah your speed is to be expected since that is apparently the speed of your current disk. Running a 64bit kernel on a 64bit cpu might speed up some applications. For other applications it probably won't make any difference. It probably would also matter if the application was compiled for 32 or 64bit. Len Sorensen