On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:17:52 +0000, Toby Riddell <toby.ridd...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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).
I'm not really surprised by this, puppet is written in Ruby (an interpreted language) vs CFengine which is written in C. I've used both, and I'd gladly trade a little CPU performance for the stability gains offered by puppet. CFengine is notoriously buggy in implementation, something I can definitely attest to (like when spaces make a difference in unions/intersections when the documentation plainly says they should not...). I'd have to see the article to know for sure if the CPU utilization difference is negligible, but having run puppet for several months now I have not seen any performance impact myself. Most systems have so may extra cores nowadays that aren't doing anything (especially in our case, running puppet during off-hours) it would have to peg multiple CPUs for an extended period of time to make a noticeable impact. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-us...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
