TRIM Management
This article summarizes the TRIM process and how ggRock uses this built-in facility of your hardware to maintain optimal performance.
What is TRIM?
Trimming is the process of executing built-in commands on the drives in order to forcibly cause the validation of blocks that have been marked as deleted but have not yet been used for other purposes.
This process of validation can be costly in terms of performance, so it is best to do it at an off-peak time.
It is also why it can be beneficial to run a trim operation periodically as opposed to allowing all of the blank blocks on the drive to become used and then later marked for deletion because then each block will incur an additional time cost as it is being written to which can severely impact performance, especially in a speed dependent operation such as GGRock.
NOTE:
TRIM operations are resource intensive and should not be run during a time when your center is actively used.
Think of your server drives as an empty parking lot with lines painted on it.
As the parking lot is used throughout the course of its life, the spaces are never cleaned of garbage, so everyone that parks there needs to clean up trash before they can pull their car in.
This process is time consuming, so the management of the parking lot have decided to instead run a process on a weekly basis to clean up all of the trash to make the parking process faster
How does ggRock Use TRIM?
Your ggRock server will automatically run a TRIM operation on your array drives between the hours of 4:00 AM and 8:00 AM every Wednesday. This may be customized to your liking to match with a time when your facility is not being actively used by navigating to the "Settings" tab with ggRock, then accessing the "Array and Images" tab, and finally the "TRIM Settings" subheading at the bottom of the page.
Troubleshooting
The downside of trim is that some array controllers, motherboards, and even drive firmware can have bugs specifically relating to the TRIM process which can range from degraded performance until a reboot of the server has occurred to instability of the array until a reboot of the server has occurred.
There is no way to easily tell if this is the case, but if your center runs into problems with server or computer stability then it can be useful troubleshooting step to utilize TRIM disablement plus a reboot to diagnose the issue.
Specifically, this is applicable if your center has performance issues that occur after a TRIM operation has occurred either on a manual or scheduled basis.
