[chef] Disable Ohai plugins causes API thrashing?

[Chris < >]

Hi Chef wizards

I started a project recently to try and reduce the memory footprint the chef-client is using on our hosts, as part of that, one of the things i've done is to disable some Ohai plugins. I modified the chef-client cookbook and added this to client.rb.erb:

<% if node.attribute?("ohai") && node["ohai"].attribute?("disabled_plugins") -%>

Ohai::Config[:disabled_plugins] = [<%= node["ohai"]["disabled_plugins"].join(",") %>]
<% end -%>

which produces this in the client.rb file:

Ohai::Config[:disabled_plugins] = ["c","cpu","perl","python","cloud","ec2","lua","ip_scopes","passwd","rackspace","dmi","dmi_common","erlang","groovy","php","eucalyptus","network_listeners","mono"]

I did this across 2 of our 4 environments. Soon afterwards the chef-server process starting going haywire, consuming all available memory and swap and eventually coming to a grinding halt. Restarting the server process helped for a while, but it would eventually grind to a halt again. 

My question is, why would disabling plugins do this? I could see maybe some solr changes taking place since the node hashes are different but that shouldn't cause problems for 3 solid days. Is the code added to the template causing extra searches that i'm not seeing?

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