¿Which Libreoffice cpu architecture I should pick?

[Miguel2013]

I always come to find software online like utilities and in this case an office suite and I usually go for 64bits cause is been long since I used my amd-2500 xp cpu and I own a phenom ii x4 and a i7 qm and I'm sure they're both 64bit cpus however I heard when using the 32bit version it will use less memory so I'm guessing if I'm running low on memory for some reason, it will keep running and run faster than the 64bit version of the app, and that the 64bit version will expand unneceseraly on the available memory like some web browsers when they can work fine under 32bit memory space. Is there a valid reason to use 64bit apps other than photoshop or gimp that need a lot of ram, what about Libreoffice?

 

[Toothless]

It's based on ram amount, not cpu. If you have 4gb or above then use 64 bit.

 

[hat]

I haven't heard of 64 bit apps taking more memory than their 32 bit counterparts for no reason... only that 64 bit apps can consume more memory, if required, than 32 bit apps are capable of. This is a good thing, it means there's nothing limiting the amount of memory a 64 bit app can use. If a 32 bit app needs more memory than it can possibly take due to limitations of 32 bit, bad things can happen. It would start running slow, or even stop working altogether or crash. 64 bit apps also have the benefit of just running faster than their 32 bit counterparts, regardless of memory use.

Always choose 64 bit over 32 bit when given the choice. 32 bit is finally being put to rest in the history books where it belongs these days...

 

[Regeneration]

Windows 64-bit uses WoW64 compatibility layer to execute 32-bit apps. This adds a tiny latency (performance penalty) for the running code. It is better to run 64-bit binaries on 64-bit OSes.

 

[Bill_Bright]

Is there a valid reason to use 64bit apps other than photoshop or gimp that need a lot of ram, what about Libreoffice?

I agree that just because a program is 64-bit, that does NOT suggest it will use more RAM. It might, or it might not. But even if it does, that does NOT suggest it is less efficient. In fact, what it suggests to me is the CPU is utilizing more RAM so it can achieve better performance running that 64-bit program - and that's a good thing!

Think roads. It is easy to picture how a 4-lane road can carry a lot more traffic in the same amount of time than a 2-lane road. Now picture a super-duper highway that has 64 lanes and compare that to a road that only has 32 lanes.

A 64-bit program running in 64-bit Windows is able to move chunks of data 64-bit wide through your computer and up onto your monitor. If you limit the size of those chunks to only 32 "lanes" obviously, it will take longer.

If a program comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit, I always choose the 64-bit version. Always. That includes LibreOffice. And remember, there is nothing wrong with using up all your RAM, as long as you don't run out of RAM!

It's based on ram amount, not cpu. If you have 4gb or above then use 64 bit.

"Based" on RAM amount? Not really. It is more the other way around. The maximum amount of RAM your system can utilized is based on the bit size of the operating system, along with the capability of the hardware, including the CPU. Fortunately, CPUs have been 64-bit capable for many years so that leaves the OS. If you have a 32-bit OS, you are generally limited to 4GB of RAM (see *NOTE below). With a 64-bit Windows 10, you are limited to 128GB of RAM with W10 Home, and 2TB of RAM with W10 Pro and most other versions.

*NOTE - because of the way hardware mapping occurs with 32-bit Windows, even if you have 4GB of RAM installed, you will only be able to access ~3.2 to 3.4GB of your installed 4GB of RAM. So if you have 4GB of RAM installed, it is still better to run 64-bit Windows so you can access the full 4GB. This is even more important if you have integrated graphics and a big chunk of your system RAM has been stolen... err... is being "shared" by your graphics.

 

[GlacierNine]

RAM usage in Operating Systems is one of those things that a lot of people simply don't understand as well as they think they do.

In this case, it's very simple - If you have a 32 Bit Executable, it can theoretically address 4GB of RAM.

Now think, how much RAM is a 32 Bit Executable like say, Foobar2000, going to actually use if you open it and start playing an album? Maybe 30MB or so. It doesn't use the full 4GB available to it because that simply isn't necessary and it doesn't need to store that much data for rapid access.

Same thing with a 64 bit Executable. If it doesn't *need* more than 4GB of RAM, then it won't *use* more than 4GB of RAM. The difference is that a 64 Bit Executable knows that amounts of RAM larger than 4GB actually exist, and if there's some good reason for the 64 Bit Executable to use that much, it can ask for it.

In comparison the 32 Bit Executable simply can't comprehend that there could ever be 4097MB of RAM, and so it's only capable of asking for 4096MB of the stuff, no matter if you have 2GB of RAM installed (In which case it would use all of it + 2048MB of your Page File), or if you have 256GB of the stuff installed (In which case it would use 4096MB of it and then either error or outright crash).

Another common RAM confusion is the idea that having lots of stuff in RAM is necessarily bad - And sure, back when PCs had very little RAM, you wanted to keep things from "hogging" it and using too much, because chances are, no matter what you were doing, it was going to take up most of your RAM and you couldn't afford to have toolbar.exe and java-update.exe taking up 50MB of your 512MB in order to do absolutely nothing, if a task like playing music was going to need another 30MB and playing a game was going to take all of the rest and end up hitting pagefile to boot. The less stuff was using your RAM, the better, because chances are you needed all of it for stuff you were doing right then and there, and you couldn't afford to have stuff sitting there that wasn't being used right now.

And that's fine if you expect literally any task to use a sizable portion of the available RAM. But once you have enough RAM that a basic task like say, playing a movie, or listening to music, is practically nonexistent in terms of memory usage, then you end up with a different problem - You have 99% of your RAM not doing anything useful most of the time, because using 200MB of 16GB to watch a movie is all you're really interested in using for the rest of that 90 minutes.

Microsoft introduced SuperFetch in Vista to take advantage of the remaining 15.8GB of RAM and have it make itself useful, and to this day we see people complain that "Windows is using too much RAM!" - No it isn't. It's looking at your commonly used programs and then loading them into RAM before you need them so that when you open that program, the OS doesn't have to start the process of grabbing all of the required files from scratch.

What happens if you don't open the program windows predicts? Well sure, it has to start loading that program into memory from scratch, just like it would for *every* program if SuperFetch were disabled. But the key difference here is that SuperFetch doesn't just "take" RAM. If you need to load something ELSE into that same RAM, there's no performance penalty, because Windows simply allows the new program to treat that Pre-allocated RAM as if it were empty space.

This works well, because DDR RAM doesn't require a seperate action to empty RAM, before new data can be put into it. There are no wasted clock cycles, no additional latency. As a result, if you see Windows Vista onwards using a lot of RAM, that's usually just fine and dandy, working as intended - As the post below says, Windows Vista/7/8/8.1/10 are not Windows XP. You shouldn't treat them the same way.

 

[Bill_Bright]

One more thing to consider. While your program may not take full advantage of a 64-bit system, 64-bit Windows does. And the faster your operating system can perform its tasks, the sooner the OS can process the other running programs' tasks. That's a good thing.

Okay, one more one more thing - As for hitting the Page File, it is true that is slower than hitting data already in RAM. But Page Files are still a good thing. The OS will only stuff lower priority data in the PF. So don't fall for the bad advice some give and think disabling the Page File (to force all data into faster RAM) is a good thing. It is NOT! Unless you truly are a bona fide expert on Windows memory management and virtual memory (and it is likley no one here truly is), leave the PF alone and just let Windows manage it! It does not matter how much RAM you have installed, Windows knows how to manage the PF properly. Remember, all those PhDs and computer scientist at Microsoft have decades and exabytes of empirical data to draw from, and supercomputers to analyze it. None of us here do. Leave the PF default settings alone! The exception would be if your boot drive is a hard drive and you want to move your PF to a SSD (a wise choice!) - but then let Windows manage it on that SSD.

Remember, W10 is not XP. Don't treat it like it is.

 

[Miguel2013]

I was looking at the extra consumption problem more like a bug rather than intentional, like i have the experience in photoshop on a mac that had 16gb of ram, as soon as opening PS it used 9 to 11 GB of ram when it didn't need it cause after opening a heavy file it still was using the same ram amount, and while it was using all that ram I had 5 to 7 left for other things only and that wasn't nice, I don't believe any program can use that much ram and even less for nothing. Maybe it has a version of superfetch where eventually PS will give up some RAM when needed by another App. Don't known all the details.

 

[GlacierNine]

OS X is not windows and Photoshop is a professional software capable of intensely heavy tasks. It is very much possible that OS X and Photoshop reserve huge amounts of RAM in preparation for specific workflows or simply access to all of the tools at a moments notice.

It could also just be a goofy install of the program that isn't working as intended.

Whatever the reason, it is nothing to do with what has been described above your post. Just install the 64 bit version as everyone has recommended.

Also for the sake of clarity - SuperFetch is a Microsoft technology and if OSX has an equivalent it will not be called superfetch.

 

[lexluthermiester]

@Miguel2013
I'm a long-term LibreOffice user and can tell you the 64bit version doesn't use much more ram, if any. It's also a bit snappier in certain tasks. The only reason you might need the 32bit version is if your OS is 32bit and/or your PC is so old that it doesn't have 64bit addressing.

Use the 64bit version with confidence.

 

[eidairaman1]

Athlon XP= x86, Athlon 64+=
X86-64/AMD64/EMT64.

You can run 32bit version on a A64+, you cannot run 64bit on Athlon XP, Pentium 4 (check specific CPUs, or older.