32bit running in 64bit OS

Community Forums/General Help/32bit running in 64bit OS

Johnsprogram(Posted 2011) [#1]
About running 32bit applications: does it take more memory to run on a 64bit OS than on a 32bit OS?


Adam Novagen(Posted 2011) [#2]
I'm not an ADVANCED techie, but as an educated intermediate's guess I'd say... Why on earth would it? The amount of RAM a program uses is entirely dependent on the data it loads and creates, so theoretically the OS should have no effect on that.


xlsior(Posted 2011) [#3]
About running 32bit applications: does it take more memory to run on a 64bit OS than on a 32bit OS?


If you want to split hairs: Very marginally so, because it also needs to load a 32->64 bit thunking library, (WOW64), in order to run 32-bit executables. The extra overhead is insignificant though.

The memory allocations made by the program itself don't change, IIRC.


Johnsprogram(Posted 2011) [#4]
I thought some 32bit programs were using more memory when running on a 64bit computer.
My first thought was for each sector of memory (64bit), only half will be used for 32-bit sector. Meaning, the other half of the 64bit sector would be unused and left out, contributing to more slack and memory usage. I might be over-exaggerating it, but I do know 32-bit apps use more RAM than 64-bit apps.