Puppet

Please please please re-write puppet in any other language than ruby or at least the performance intensive bits of it to make it go faster.

I have previously re-written several thousand lines of my puppet code to work around puppet’s poor performance which took apply time from 300 secs on a fast modern server down to 70 secs.

However, this is still not enough for applying a few KB worth of config txt files.

Imagine having 15-20 virtual machines running on an ESX box, each one running puppet every 30 mins. Ouch, the pain I suffer… and believe me I spent ages optimizing my puppet code to not use expensive ops like recurse…

Also, I would like to have puppet apply more often, say every 10 mins per machine so that stuff is fixed faster, but this is impossible given how badly my machines are dying from puppet’s record performance killing and these are brand new multi-core servers.

The contention in a virtualized environment that puppet causes is excruciatingly painful.

I would hate to see puppet replaced by another solution both here and across the world simply because of performance. I think otherwise it has done a wonderful job, much better than cfengine.

Puppet should live on, not be replaced simply because the code was so slow to run. Python runs like compiled C compared to Ruby, I wish some more effort had gone in to using it instead, it’s really a very easy language for the most part…

Why Ruby? Die Ruby! Help replace Ruby not Puppet!