EM64T, HyperThreading, and filesystems (was Gentoo on PowerEdge 1850)

[Jason Clouse]

Thanks for the encouragement, guys.  I was glad to see there is kernel
support for the RAID controller, and an ebuild for OMSA.

I have a couple of questions on setup though.  I'm wondering if I should
bother with a 64-bit install or not, and also whether I should turn
HyperThreading and SMP on.

I have 2 GB of memory and the server will be handling web, database,
PHP, ASP (via Mono), and possibly some Java applications.  All in all, I
don't think I have a need for 64-bit in and of itself.  But I was
wondering if a fully 64-bit system will gain anything from the other
enhancements in x86-64 (extra registers primarily).  The benchmarks I've
seen seem to imply that Intel's x86-64 implementation actually suffers a
performance *penalty*, in shocking contrast to AMD's approach.
HyperThreading also seemed to be inferior.

Are these benchmarks bunk?  Would a Gentoo stage 1 build with Intel's
compiler work, make a significant difference, and be reliable?

Finally, the filesystem shoot-outs I've seen tell me that JFS or ext3
are best for databases and XFS is the winner for regular filesystem use.
Would a separate partition for database store make sense?  That would
allow for a more specialized filesystem and would make backups a snap.