Previously I posted a quick bit of information about Puppet 0.25 upgrade and how it sped up file transfers, below some more information.
First some metrics from the puppetmaster before and after, this particular master handles around 50 clients on a 30 minute interval. The master is a Mongrel + Apache master with 4 worker processes running on a 64bit CentOS 5.3 VM with 1GB RAM
First the CPU graph, blue is user time red is system time:
The next is Load Average, it’s a stack of 5, 10 and 15 minute averages:
And finally here is a bandwidth of the master blue is outbound and green is incoming:
So this is the master, it’s very interesting that the master is a lot busier than before, even with just 50 nodes this is a significant CPU increase, I do not know how this will map to say 500 or 600 nodes but I think larger sites will want to be pretty careful about updating a large chunk of machines without testing the impact.
Finally here is a graph from a node, the node has 450 file resources and doesn’t do anything but run Puppet all day – at night in this graph for a short period it did backups after that it idled again. In this case combined with the massive drop in run time the cpu time is also way down, I think this is a massive win – you can always add more masters easily but suffering on all your nodes under puppetd is pretty bad. This on its own for me is a pretty big win for upgrading to Puppet 0.25.
This graph is obviously taken some hours later but it’s the same basic scale.
I did not see a noticeable change in memory profile on either master of nodes so no graphs included here for that.
Overall I think this is a big win, but be careful of what happens on your masters when you upgrade.
