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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T11:50:15+00:00

I am about to buy a server, before I do so, I just wanted

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I am about to buy a server, before I do so, I just wanted to ask the SO community on its thoughts of a 32 bit server or a 64 bit server and its advatnages on a LAMP stack.

1) Is it difficult to install Apache, MySQL and PHP on a 64 bit machine or is it the same as a 32 bit machine?

2) Are there any performance gains of having a 64 bit machine rather than a 32 bit machine when it comes to a simple web application?

Apart from Create, Read, Update and Delete on a MySQL database, my application will be generating png images using PHP.

Just to let you know, there is no point of having a 32 bit OS installed on a 64 bit machine. See this great article.

3) Finally any other benefits or disadvantages of opting for a 64 bit machine?

Thanks all for any insight into this.

N.B. This doesn’t belong on serverfault, as I don’t have a problem with my yet to buy server. 🙂

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  1. Editorial Team

    edit 2015

    A few years back, the installation of a 64 bits server could have been a risky operation. 64 bits OSes were new, less tested, and only a few 64 bits applications were available.

    And later, a couple of years ago (around 2010), installing Redhat and Ubuntu 64 bits on several production servers to run Apache/nginx, Mysql, PHP was still a bit worrying. But finally, the installation of the OS and the various applications went flawlessly. Having me wondering and checking if I really installed a 64 bits version!

    Nowadays 64 bits is the default for most OSes running on desktops/laptops.

    Some advantages of a 64 bits web server

    • Performance gain. Thanks to the width of the data that can be processed at once by the processor. For instance dealing with 64 bits of memory instead of 32, but that gain is very linked to the running applications and may not be that sensible depending on the data structure.

    • Memory addresses range. An important advantage is that with a 64 bits OS, you are not limited anymore to 4 GB of RAM. A 64 bits OS may potentially address 264 bytes in memory – no computer on Earth has that much memory currently!

    • Some applications behave differently on 32 bits and 64 bits. Web wise, PHP integers have 32 bits (232 values) on 32 bits OSes, and 64 bits (264 values) on 64 bits OSes ; this might be a problem when running 3rd party programs on a 32 bits OS that were initially written by a developer working on a 64 bits OS (who is unlikely to meet bugs due to the 32 bits integer limitation).

    One disadvantage of running a 64 bits OS / web server is the size of the executables, that take usually some more space on disk and when running in memory.

    Please see this link and read also the comments at the bottom.

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