Flash, and 32 vs. 64

[Patrick Goetz]

Danny Piccirillo wrote:
> Until i got the 64-bit version of flash, YouTube would crash everytime i 
> scrolled on a ....Not to mention it was slowww. All of those things have been
> fixed now that i'm using the native 64-bit version and i've had zero 
> problems
> 

Let me clarify that we've only tested this with Jaunty, not Intrepid nor 
Karmic; but yes, the native 64-bit alpha flash seems to work better than 
the 32-bit wrapper approach.

We're trying to decide at this point if we should go ahead and roll out 
a 64-bit distribution to most of our workstations in the next upgrade 
cycle from Hardy to Jaunty.  Because we're a scientific computing 
environment, it's already been pointed out that we're going to reduce 
the amount of memory available to user space applications by doing this 
(64-bit pointers take up twice as much space as 32-bit pointers).  On 
the other hand, memory is fairly cheap these days.  Does anyone have any 
thoughts on this?  Aside from Flash, another concern was java run in the 
browser, but this seems to work fine too in Jaunty.