[Puppet Users] Magazine article comparing CPU usage of Puppet vs. Cfengine

Toby Riddell
2010-02-22T21:17:52Z

I received my copy of ;login (the Usenix magazine) today. There''s an
article* comparing CPU utilisation of Puppet and Cfengine. To
abbreviate massively: Puppet requires much more CPU than Cfengine when
both verifying and fixing configuration.

I''m in the early days of implementing Puppet and this has given me
something to think about. Whilst I won''t be verifying/fixing
configuration on our servers on a continual basis, it would be nice if
it could be done with low CPU overhead. I am not familiar with
Cfengine beyond the reading I did while choosing which configuration
management tool to use; I chose Puppet because it seemed more flexible
and I figured me and my team would be able to get more done in less
time once we''d learned how to use it.

Can CPU overhead be reduced to something closer to Cfengine, or is it
inherent in the design/implementation of Puppet? Is there an upside in
terms of greater flexibility of Puppet?

I''d welcome comments from those familiar with both Puppet and Cfengine.

*Article is here:
http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2010-02/pdfs/bjorgeengen.pdf.
Note that reading the magazine article requires a subscription, at
least until Feb 2011 (articles published more than 12 months ago are
openly available).