Oh - come on Abigail,

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.

If all that is going to work out that way, I'll be a happy man. :-)

Bye
 PetaMem

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