16-bit hardware and paging extensions lasted from the Commodore to the 386 Intel's PAE hack and lack of a visible 64-bit consumer strategy (Itanium is not a consumer strategy) suggest that they will try to put off the 64-bit migration in the same way. Given the performance and space hits you get with 64-bits, it might win.

As for memory for speed, if the amount of pre-buffering assigned to arrays, hash fill for a split of hashes, and similar parameters were tunable at runtime, then less could be made to work. Perl would still trade memory for performance, but how much could be adjusted significantly.

64bits from Sun @ $1000. You're joking. Not even the recent 32bit linux systems from Sun cost less than 1500,- US$ with 256MB RAM. They're PC's with the Sun label.

And I say "big iron", because the memory overhead in perl is much worse for 64bit architectures than it is for 32bit, so to get everything to memory you get on a 32bit/4GB config, you need an up to 64bit/12GB configuration. YES factor of 3. So to double your capacity with the help of 64bit, you need to buy BIG iron with at least 24GB. Try it. And try to get this for something less than 50.000US$

But I'm happy, that most of the replies (and current considerations for 5.10) give more focus to this problem. So the most realistic scenario for us will be, that solutions for this problem will come from 3 directions:

• We are designing the architecture of the application partitionable, so it can be distributed over n nodes of a cluster.
• Some work on the perl side will surely be done to lower Perls memory overhead (thanks for the use less pragma pointer).
• maybe in 3-5 years we'll really have 64bit with xx GB for a few bucks and will build clusters with these.

Bye
 PetaMem

http://www.sun.com/desktop/sunblade100/. $995, 64bits.

Abigail

You are really good at joking. This "thing" offers MAX 2GB RAM (what were we talking about?), has 128MB and a 500MHz CPU and a 20GB HD.

So I looked at the relevant configs:

cheapest Sun Blade 2000. It can have up to 8GB of RAM: $10.995,00 But 8GB are not available, as there are only 512MB sticks and 8 slots. Given very optimistic prices, one would have to pay around $17.000,00 to get 8GB

(we paid $7000,- for our 3GB dual-P3 with 100GB RAID)

Ok. Let's look a little bit further:

The smallest reasonable config would be a Sun Fire V480 Entry-Level Server. With 16GB RAM it costs: $46.995,-

Big Iron for us...

Bye
 PetaMem