Yep, exactly the same situation for me. I'm also with Linode by the way. ;)

Not true for the VPS scenario. In fact it isn't true for those with hardware that can't do 64-Bit either but are using i686.

Why isn't it true ?

With regards to my VPS, as mentioned previously my linode package is the cheapest one they offer and hence has 512Mb of RAM allocated to it. audriusk has the same plan and hence the same situation, as do others I am sure. Many of the entry level VPS packages provide very little RAM. When using one of these it is better to run 32-Bit is it not?

Regarding those that have actual i686 chips (not x86_64), they would get better performance (in some apps) if Slackware was complied for i686, without being held back for i486. I know that Slackware uses -O2 -march=i486 -mtune=i686 but if I understand correctly full optimisation for i686 would likely be better for those users.

As you can see here, the performance increase when compiling for i686 instead of i486 is in most benchmarks negligible, as long as you don't compile for your specific CPU (including advanced features like MMX, SSE, ...).
For those people it would be nice if Slackware could be compiled from scratch with -march=native, but since that is (currently?) not possible people that really need the performance on their 32 bit machines should use Gentoo or other source based distros.

Although I too would be interested, just for fun, in a Slackware that can be compiled from scratch ;).

Sure it isn't massive but there is some performance gain. From the summary of the article you linked to:

That said, I am not actually suggesting Slackware dropping i486 and moving to i686. I was just playing devil's advocate.

However on the VPS side I do think 32-Bit continues to be reasonable choice if you only have a limited amount of RAM available for the package you are renting. So the reasons for keeping 32-Bit are not just old hardware or because of certain 32-Bit only packages (where the user does not want to consider multilib).

Not only on VPS. I use an Atom 330 with 1GB of RAM and it runs 32 bit just fine, no need for 64 bit here and since the bottleneck here is the network connection I wouldn't get better performance with 64 bit.

I recommend doing benchmarks before assuming that 64-bit will not be better. You will have to switch to 64-bit one day, and it's not too far off.

Well 64-bit applications will certainly use more memory.

http://www.akamaras.com/linux/32bit-...r-low-end-vps/
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1202447
http://superuser.com/questions/25682...-512mb-ram-vps

It remains pretty far of for as long as the low end VPS accounts offer only 256 or 512Mb of RAM.

Yes, from what I see it uses about 20-30% more RAM, but NOT twice as much like rumors suggest.

Depending on the application, performance benefits can be many times faster, especially for encryption and multimedia encoding.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...204_3264&num=1

Atom processors benefit greatly from both compiling for the Atom processor and 64-bit if it supports it.

Still using Slack 14 32 bit for a file server and thinking of adding a BBS.

The main reason for me to use 32-bit is software support. The occasional use I make of Skype (someone mentioned it in this thread) comes to mind.

I could try multilib (one of those things I've never read about), but not just now. Maybe in the next Slackware version. :)

compassnet.

I tried once , needs too much work to add -march=native

I do not care as 64-bits support >4GB better