Should swap space be mirrored via geom?

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 14, 2009, at 8:04 AM, Peter Steele wrote:
> We have been debating whether or we should mirror the swap  
> partitions as
> well. I set it up not mirrored based on some articles I read on the  
> net,
> but we're concerned what might happen to a system if a drive died at a
> time when the its swap partition contained active pages. My first
> reaction would be that the applications bound to these pages would
> crash, something that would not happen if we used swap mirroring.

If you don't mirror swap space, and a drive goes out, you're almost  
certain to experience a kernel panic and not just application failures  
in userland.  Unless you have an urgent need for lots of swap space  
available, it's much better from the standpoint of system reliability  
to mirror swap also.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck