Do you all think the 64 bit kernel SL is a little bit "snappier" or I am I nuts?

The official line from Apple is that the 64 bit kernel really doesn't help unless you have more than 32 gbs of RAM. but I swear with my 8gbs of RAM I can tell a big difference between booting in 64 bit vs 32.

The two major speed improvements I notice are better UI response between 64 bit apps and faster starting of apps overall (which is already too fast to clock, so its just a feeling). Also I noticed that my system does not get more sluggish over a long period of time, but that could just be the magic of SL over old Leopard (never left it in 32 bit more more than two days).

I have read on the forum that since the 32 bit kernel can run 64 bit apps its shouldn't matter, but back in my Linux days I used to compare the 32 bit and 64 bit Ubuntus often and the 64 bit version felt snappier there as well.

The only benchmark I could find so far on the net seems to indicate that I am maybe not going nuts:

http://scripts.mit.edu/~birge/blog/benchma...?wscr=1920x1200

64 bit has the better user interface score.

And to head off the worst comments from the start: no its not blast processing, yes I made sure I didn't hit the turbo button, yes I know more bits makes my epini larger but I swear its more than that, yes I know the word snappier has a certain connotation in Macland but there is no better way to put it...

64-bit kernel works better than viagra!

And, as with viagra if you do not have women available, even the 64-bit kernel if you do not have at least 16 G of RAM is useless.

Giorgio

All I know is that it just loads for ages after startup now and is in effect unusable for a longer time than before. Also, Shutdown takes longer for me.

Finder is definitely faster though. That's just not worth the two Kernel Panics a day IMHO - and that's on an iMac, not a Hackintosh

I missed that one.

I figured out why 64bit was running better- I was having some sort of disk issue on the 32 bit version- I would get KPs when I mounted hotswap sata drives or when I tried to fix disk permissions in the disk utility. A reinstall fixed the issue.

I am still using 64 bit mode though because a close friend of mine who is a huge Apple fan (and has given me a lot of crap about my hackintosh I must add) can't get 64 bit to work well on his iMac and since its the same for me (as in 32 vs 64) I run 64bit just to rub it in a little.

So yeah, I guess its only good for d**k measuring contests- just like sports cars, missile defense programs, and rulers....

Well, the kernel might be a bit faster because it can use more cpu registers instead of the stack (memory) for short term storage. Other than that there are not many reasons it will be faster. Almost everything in userland can run in 64bit now so the big benefits will be there whether you run 32 or 64 bit kernel.

Of course most importantly it is easier to get a hack than a proper mac to run 64 bit kernel :-=)