Sunny Days 16 – 64 Bits: The Dark Side

As wonderful as it is, playing with the new Sun machines and Solaris, there’s one major downside: They’re 64 bit. Now, generally one would tend to believe that this is good. Having 64 bit wide data paths allows you to overcome some problems of the 32-bit-world like limits on file sizes and a somewhat limited addressable memory space. So most applications should benefit from 64 bit. True, true.

But this only holds true as long as you’re able to compile the apps you intend to run. Now imagine you’d want to run a web server. Easy, you’ll say. Just compile Apache and be done with it. Unfortunately, you’re not. That’s because many web applications today use PHP. No big problem there, either. You just grab the latest tarball, compile your own version of PHP and be done with it. Still true, but there’s one major road block: Commercial applications using PHP.

Those tend to require an additional piece of software, generally known as “PHP Optimizer”. Currently, there are two of these with some market relevance: Zend Optimizer and IonCube. Both are freely available and even Solaris seems to be supported. But a closer look reveals that both products are available in 32 bits only. Since you can’t integrate a 32 bit module into a 64 bit version of PHP, to make them work you also have to compile PHP using 32 bits only. And since you can’t load a 32 bit libphpX.so into a 64 bit version of Apache, you’ll also have to compile your web server using 32 bits. There goes the advantage of 64 bits.

One could argue that this problem should be really easy to fix. Zend as well as IonCube already provide Solaris versions of their products. So they should know ho to compile and build them on this platform. Making a 64 bit version is no real hassle, so why don’t they offer one?

The answer is: I don’t know. Inquiries with both companies concerning this very topic always get the same response: None. They seem to be totally unwilling to at least talk about a 64 bit version for Solaris. With Zend, I don’t find this surprising. Not answering on inquiries seems to be their standard rule of engagement with customers. IonCube is a different story for at least in their forums I always found some helpful advice and support. Just not for 64 bit on Solaris. Maybe they believe that offering a 64 bit version for Linux of their products is good enough. However, albeit possible, running Linux on a T2000 isn’t exactly what I want to do.