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

Thomas Bellman
2010-02-23T20:43:14Z

James Cammarata wrote:

> Also, this doesn''t seem to be CPU load, just time.  It took puppet
longer
> to apply a manifest than CFengine, I''m assuming they made the same
changes
> on both systems and had both CFengine and puppet correct the same
> differences.  Wall clocks != higher load.
>
> In my opinion, this is a non-issue, since normally if you''ve got
any major
> number of systems you''ll either be triggering runs in parallel, or
they''ll
> be updating automatically on their own environment wide.

The time it takes to run Puppet is an issue to me.  I have some
machines where it takes 30 seconds for ''puppetd --onetime'' to
complete, even when there is nothing to do.  That''s annoyingly
long to wait when I have written a new class and am testing the
new manifests.  Only to find out that nothing happened, realize
I forgot to actually call include on the new class, and then
there''s another half minute wait.

This is on pretty recent eight-core Opteron machines with
32 Gbyte RAM and sitting mostly idle.  It does include
plugin-syncing, though.

On the other hand, some other machines take just 10-11 seconds
to complete, even though there are more resource declarations
for them in the manifests.  It''s not obvious why some machines
take longer to run Puppet than others, and I haven''t had time
to investigate in more detail what causes that.  I''ll have to
do that some day.

If the unattended runs (which I do every fourth hour from cron)
takes five or fifty seconds doesn''t matter much to me, but the
wait during interactive development of the manifests is irritating.


	/Bellman