A recent post on a dba-village.com forum triggered this topic. The forum member mentioned that one of the drawback of running 32-bit Oracle server on Windows x64 is, among other things, the limitation of total 3GB of memory per process, as it was the case in old-days, running Windows 2000/2003 with /3GB switch in boot.ini. This is not correct.

Well, Microsoft replaced venerable WOW32 with WOW64 in Windows x64. WOW32 was designed to run 16-bit applications on 32-bit OS and WOW64 that ships with Windows x64 was designed to support running 32-bit applications on Windows x64. (Btw. you can’t run 16-bit applications on Windows x64 anymore)

So, the question is, how does WOW64 handle memory for 32-bit applications? Well, it emulates the old environment, with one benefit. By default, the 32-bit application will have 2GB available virtual memory and if it’s compiled with /LARGERMEMORYAWARE flag, then the process can address 4GB of virtual memory. For example, oracle.exe (32bit) is compiled with such flag – that’s why it could use extra memory given by /3GB switch via boot.ini in the old days and that’s why it can address full 4GB within WOW64! That’s 1GB more compared to the very same process running natively on 32-bit Windows OS/CPU.

Two recommended articles:

• Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions, Deployment Scenarios by MVP, Charlie Russel
• Introducing Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions for the Intel EM64T Platform by Ranjith Purush and Chip Webb