Chef Part 2 - Performance(engineering.voxer.com)
engineering.voxer.com
Chef Part 2 - Performance
http://engineering.voxer.com/post/45944103472/chef-part-2-performance
3 comments
[deleted]
Well, searching in Chef isn't like querying a DB, it's a full search against Apache Solr, a nice wrapper for the Lucene search engine and is capable of various powerful searches.
There is something very wrong, if you can't search a corpus of 200 documents of roughly 512kb size each with solr in milliseconds. Especially on something as simple as a simple field/facet search for node role match. 2-3s per search sounds like something else is the bottleneck rather than solr.
+1 for this comment. 2-3s per search is TERRIBLE performance, and disgusting given the document count / index size.
There is a partial_search available with chef server 11 that makes this problem much less painful. Search returns the entire node object for each match, which can be a ton of data as the node count rises. With partial_search you specify just the attributes that you to be returned.
Basically, Chef is giving you enough rope etc. With Puppet at least, you CAN get into trouble and make your manifests take these kinds of length of time to compile, but it's relatively difficult. Additionally, I believe the equal of 'searching' in Chef is PuppetDB. In my experience at least, resolving stored facts from PuppetDB is extremely fast, as in, fast enough that you don't know it's actually doing much of anything on a database level.
Really I think the take-away from this is be careful what you do with CM. It could end up making more, not less work for you!