[chef] Re: Re: Re: resource usage for chef server

[Albert Llop <mrsimo@gmail.com>]

our experience is that a 256mb slice is slightly small for the resources needed for a chef-server. You need two "instances" of the server working, and that's as many rails apps (i guess merb requires a little less) as you can get to work "properly" in a 256mb slice, but with chef-server you also need couchdb and stompserver. For us it didn't work properly until we upgraded to a 512mb slice.

my suggestion is to use a 360mb slice from linode (for example, costs the same as a 256mb slicehost), or to upgrade your current 256 to a higher plan, and use the extra resources for other things you might need. Remember that with a 256mb slice you're "losing" a good chunk on basic system processes, whereas when you upgrade to a higher plan, all that extra memory is "clean", as opposed to having two 256mb slices.

Also nginx is pretty light, yeah :)
--
Albert Llop
Tech Department
kingsofmambo.com

2009/7/6 Arjuna Christensen <aj@opscode.com>

On 6/07/2009, at 10:34 AM, Adam Jacob wrote:

It's going to depend on what you are serving, and how.  If you are
really memory constrained, I would start looking at running a pair of
thins and chef-client via cron.

Blaming the web server was a little out of line of me, and my knee jerk reaction is to install a lighter weight reverse proxy; however; depending on the number of nodes you're using you may not need to run a reverse proxying webserver at all (apache, nginx, lighttpd, haproxy, .., ..) unless you require SSL connection termination.

Hope this helps!

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Joe Van Dyk<joe@fixieconsulting.com> wrote:

Should I be expected to run chef on a 256 megabyte server, if that's all

it's doing?

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

23665 couchdb   20   0  340m  40m 1300 S    0 15.9  38:16.26 beam.smp

23881 chef      20   0  111m  38m 1788 S    0 14.9   2:04.86 ruby

4848 root      20   0 86952  26m 1776 S    0 10.4  28:59.37 chef-client

3615 chef      20   0 86340  23m 1192 S    0  9.2  54:01.36 chef-indexer

23884 chef      20   0  109m  14m 1684 S    0  5.8   0:10.02 ruby

3617 root      20   0 69164 9852  992 S    0  3.8  17:08.68 stompserver

7272 www-data  20   0  726m 5632 2056 S    0  2.1  19:06.03 apache2

7373 www-data  20   0  726m 5592 2052 S    0  2.1  19:03.68 apache2

It's swapping a bit.

--
Opscode, Inc.
Adam Jacob, CTO
T: (206) 508-7449 E: adam@opscode.com

-- 
AJ Christensen, Software Engineer

Opscode, Inc.
E: aj@opscode.com