[ale] who is eating my drive

[Pat Regan]

On Tue, 31 May 2011 15:34:05 -0400
Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 31 May 2011 14:49:53 -0400
> > Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > swap notes: NEVER put swap on a raid5. If you must park swap on a
> > > RAID rig, mirrored partitions are OK. If swap gets hosed, the box
> > > crashes. The RAID5/6 writes for swap are performance killers. Swap
> > > will do it own striping so don't bother doing a raid10. multiple
> > > swap parts on multiple drive spindles is a good thing. Say 8G RAM
> > > and 4 1TB drives, set up a 4G swap on each of the drives.
> >
> > Putting swap on RAID also means that your server won't go down due
> > to a disk failure.
> >
> 
> Swap on RAID5/6 means during a rebuild the disk IO times out on swap
> retrieval and the kernel panics thinking the swap is down.

I have never had this happen, although I can only recall one time that
I've ever had swap on a RAID 5.  It was a hardware RAID 5 and was the
only disk available.

Is this only a problem with software RAID?  I'd be surprised if it is...

In your experience with this situation, where exactly is the timeout
happening?

Pat