Is it a good idea to use Ubuntu 64bit on dev/testing machine?

I'm a web application developer for a large company where i develop a application currently running on Tomcat/Java + MySQL.

I am finally getting my on personal testing and development machine. I will be rewriting it to PHP. Is it worth using Ubuntu 64bit on it? Because i had a idea since it's a dev machine only and all the sorce code is svn'ed to a seperate machine i wanted to use RAID 0 for all 4 drives. I need fast access speed because the application uses quite huge SQL selects over a huge amount of data.

Or it's just not worth it and should i just move the database to a RamDisk and not bother at all with RAID 0?

Tools are no problem either because i will be using eclipse for the development.

Machine specs:
2x Quad-core Intel Xeon e5620 (yay for 8 physical and 16 logical cores :)
10GB ddr3 ram
4x 160 SAS disks

Gabriel

Posted 2011-01-19T22:01:09.087

Reputation: 193

1As opposed to a 32-bit Ubuntu? A better question might be "Why not use Ubuntu 64-bit?" – Seth – 2011-01-19T22:34:51.337

As opposed to 64 bit Windows 7... i forgot to write that into the question. – Gabriel – 2011-01-20T08:34:59.153

Answers

Like @Seth says in his comment, why not use 64-bit? If nothing else, you've got the bigger memory options at the very least. I'd switch to 64-bit.

user3463

Posted 2011-01-19T22:01:09.087

Reputation:

If you want to use the full 10GB of RAM on your machine you HAVE to use a 64Bit OS. 32Bit can only address 3.5 GB of RAM.

Another option to consider is to use a Hyper Visor (like VirtualBox or Xen) to take advantage of virtualization. You can setup a dev box, a web server, and a separate database server on the same machine with power to spare.

Michael Brown

Posted 2011-01-19T22:01:09.087

Reputation: 295