[chef] Re: Effeciency of data bags?

[Seth Falcon < >]

Hi,

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 11:40 AM, Mason Turner 
<
 >
 wrote:
> I have a recipe that builds an rdist distfile by searching for nodes
> that match a particular attribute. These queries are taking about 3
> seconds, and i have less then 20 nodes in my chef DB. I'm sure there
> are some ways to optimize my chef server, but I am also considering
> pre-building the data in a databag. Does chef-client use a "last
> modified" field to prevent lookups from the databag if nothing has
> changed?

I don't think that chef-client currently does any conditional GETs.
And in fact, a common way of accessing data bags is via search :-\

My general advice is to stick with search and to investigate tuning if
the performance isn't satisfactory.

How many queries are you doing in your recipe?  Three second response
time isn't so great, but in the context of a chef-client run might not
be so bad unless you are running many such queries.  Perhaps you can
pull across a larger query -- like all nodes if you only have 20 and
do all of the querying locally.  Then you'd only need a single query.

+ seth