[chef] Re: What kind of load can Chef Server support?

[Ranjib Dey < >]

do you really need 200 nodes to communicate with chef server at the same time? You can run chef-client as an hourly cron job and use the last octet % 60  of servers ip as the minute value in your crontab. Our chef server handles similar load with 2GB ram /1 vcpu, with couchdb/rabbitmq/solr all running on the same box. You need to do regular couchdb compaction to keep the disk usage low. We had few pain points with solr , but never really any scalability issue.

for more : http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Scalability+and+High+Availability

regards

ranjib

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 7:57 AM, < "> > wrote:

Hi all,

We're firing up the Open Source Chef Server hosted on our own network.

Initially, we'll have a 100-200 nodes. Potentially that could ramp up to
several thousand.

Initially, frequency of deployment could be high as our software hasn't
been given the TLC it deserves. We're a startup and the pressure is on
getting something out to secure the next round of funding. So reliance on
Chef will likely start high as we need to deploy fixes for busted software, and
then flatten potentially as we're given more latitude to bake in some quality
as we go when cash-flow becomes a little more predictable.

Our recipe sizes aren't particularly large and currently all nodes have the
same roles. Just a deploy-revision from Github and then a bit of
templating/file management finishing with an Apache and Tomcat restart.

I guess my question is, if we were to flick the switch on a rollout to 200
nodes at the sametime, would Chef server cope with that level of
concurrency? If we have our nodes running as daemons, we can stagger deploys
with a splay time I guess.

Anyone had any experiences with loading chef server with a large number of
nodes?

Cheers

Ben