[Cross-Referenced from Zach Rosenfield's Blog]  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: After 5 months we’re just shy o

[Cross-Referenced from Zach Rosenfield's Blog] 

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:

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:

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