32 bit Host running on 64 bit machine

Question

Hi All,
I am running biztalk on 64 bit computer. I know we can configure 32 bit host on 64 bit computer.
My question is  will there be any negative impact or performance hit? Can this configuration create any issue in future?
Thanks

Answer 1

First the impact on usage point of view,
running
FTP adapter, POP3 adapter, and MIME Decoder on 64-bit host instances is not supported. So you got to have 32-bit host instance configured for these adapters.
You don’t have option, so no performance comparisons if you want to use host instances on these adapters.
FYI, SQL adapter in BizTalk 2013 and R2 does support 64-bit. This was the case until BizTalk 2009. Things have changed from BizTalk 2010 onwards (I think change happened in BTS
2010, I am sure SQL adapter is supported in 64 in BizTalk 2013/R2). Reference:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560166.aspx
For all other adapters and processes:
Since you’re checking the performance impact of 32-bit host instances in 64-bit product, it’s better to understand the background and its impact in BizTalk process.
On Windows x64, 32-bit host instance under WOW64 and may utilize the full 4GB of virtual memory i.e  4 GB can be addressable ((2^32) in BizTalk
application which is "large address aware" app. On this 4 GB, 2GB are allocated for applications handles (user mode), and 2GB for the Kernel handles –OS. However, 32-bit applications may not be able to
create as many threads under WOW64 as they can when running natively on x86-based systems because WOW64 allocates an additional 64-bit stack (usually 512 KB) for each thread. In addition, some amount of address space is reserved for WOW64 itself and the data
structures it uses. The amount reserved depends on the processor; more is reserved on the Intel Itanium than on the x64 processor. There is an impact when you compare 32 bit process in 64-bit.
Having said this, the 4GB of virtual memory allocation is just for one host instance, But with host instance design you can have more than one host instance and allocate
BizTalk process to different host instances based on expected load. So any performance impact due to the fact “32-bit host in 64-bit” is low and manageable with correct host instance allocation design.
Reference:
Performance and Memory Consumption Under 32-bit in WOW64. 
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