Linux gurus, I got a question for you guys. In a high availability production linux system with a RAID 1 or RAID 5 install, is it generally better to setup your swap partition(s) to be non-RAID or do you want your swap to be redundant as well? From an I/O perspective, if you are writing to swap you don't want the overhead of RAID 1/RAID 5 to slow you down (even though reads would be fast). I can also see the I/O advantage of have a swap partition on each of the drives but not in the RAID itself. Now for the argument the other way. If high availability is more of a concern than I/O, shouldn't the swap partition be put in a RAID. Some vendors like Penguin Computing claim that putting swap in a RAID 5 using 6 IDE drives will yield horrible performance. Does that sound right? Do the writes of a RAID 5 create that much overhead for swap?
Aaron Lopez PerMedics Inc. System Administrator 909.558.8155 [email protected]
