[chef] Re: Re: chef-client memory usage

[Erik Hollensbe < >]

You could also schedule chef-client runs when they're necessary, e.g. design 
hooks for controlled deployments.

-Erik

On Dec 8, 2011, at 1:46 PM, Alex Soto wrote:

> 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!
>> 
>> 
>