[Gluster-users] thin arbiter vs standard arbiter

[wkmail]

I see mentions of thin arbiter in the 4.x notes and I am intrigued.

As I understand it, the thin arbiter volume is

a) receives its data on an async basis (thus it can be on a slower 
link). Thus gluster isn't waiting around to verify if it actually got 
the data.

b) is only consulted in situations where Gluster needs that third vote, 
otherwise it is not consulted.

c) Performance should therefore be better because Gluster is only 
seriously talking to 2 nodes instead of 3 nodes (as in normal arbiter or 
rep 3)

Am I correct?

If so, is thin arbiter ready for production or at least use on 
non-critical workloads?

How safe is it for VMs images (and/or VMs with sharding)?

How much faster is thin arbiter setup over a normal arbiter given that 
the normal data only really sees the metadata?

In a degraded situation (i.e. loss of one real node), would having a 
thin arbiter on a slow link be problematic until everything is healed 
and returned to normal?

Sincerely,

-wk