Thanks for posting that (although I didn't see any benchmarks).

My big problem with the first article was that in my experience, the extra registers available in 64-bit make all the difference in the world. In the comments for the article you posted, he says that isn't true with VS. Surprising, but I'll take his word for it.

Still, it bothers me that he keeps talking about 4 GB of code and data should be enough. VS becomes pretty unusable for me around 1.5 - 2 GB. If it worked reliably up to the 4 GB limit, I'd be happier.

The limit is usually address space fragmentation and at one point not being able to find a piece of memory large enough for an allocation. Depending on the allocation patterns this may happen around 3 GiB but for some applications even around 1.7 GiB already. VS gets unbearably slow around 2 GiB memory, though, most likely because the native allocator has to piece together all free pieces of memory again and in the managed part the GC probably has fun trying to compact memory.