Mark Shust

When installing new packages on CentOS on a 64-bit machine, it installs both 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x64_86) versions. This is completely unwanted and may lead to undesired results, and has recently caused problems with machines I manage with high-load running apache (possible 32-bit packages installed on a 64-bit machine?). Regardless, the i386 packages are completely unnecessary and should be removed if you are running a 64-bit machine, which is most-likely just about every server out there.

You can run the following command to display a list of all i386 packages on your machine. You can be assured that there is a x64_86 version installed for every one of those i386 packages.

rpm -qa --qf '%{name}.%{ARCH}\n' | grep i386

To remove a i386 package, just designate the package to be removed and add .i386 to the end of it (ex. yum remove xulrunner.i386). In order to change the default config for installing new packages, add this at the bottom of your /etc/yum.conf file:

# Only install x64_86 packages
multilib_policy=best