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

Aurelien Degremont
2010-02-23T09:50:39Z

Hello

When testing puppet scalability, we noticed that one bottleneck is CPU usage on
puppetmaster node.
To scale up the number of concurrent puppet clients running in the same time, we
tweaked our puppet configuration in
order to reduce puppetmaster work, mainly reducing its CPU work, and so scale
up. (One major point was: do not overload
your fileserver).


Aurélien

Toby Riddell a écrit :
> 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).
>


--
Aurelien Degremont
CEA