[chef] Re: chef-client memory usage

[Alex Soto < >]

maybe run the client via cron instead of a daemon so the memory use is only 
during client runs.

On Dec 8, 2011, at 1:43 PM, Chris wrote:

> My company is pretty late to the Chef party, only getting things started 
> about 6 months ago (after a year of asking for it), but now that we have 
> things up and running we've run into a bit of a problem. The client 
> consumes a fairly large amount of memory, between 175-250m per server. This 
> has caused a lot of concern from the Operations team since that amount * N 
> VMs can get quite expensive. I've been doing some research into this and 
> noticed that the amount of resident memory can depend on how many recipes 
> are loaded on a node, and Opscode docs seem to confirm this. Right now 
> these cookbooks are loaded into a single base role and added to each node 
> for ease of use. They're all OS level recipes to manage hostfiles, 
> resolv.conf etc.. etc.. There are 20 total. We also have application roles 
> that can add another 3 or 4 recipes.
> I've hacked around a bit on the Samba cookbook and removed all the code 
> used to create users, which has lowered the memory foot print down to a 
> steady 192m, but i fear this won't be enough to convince my ops team to 
> keep chef. They want to dump it and go back to using shell and perl scripts 
> for everything. 
> 
> My question is, does anyone have any tips for reducing the memory usage? 
> I'd like to be able to keep Chef around. 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
>