[chef] Re: Re: Trouble getting chef-client to run automatically

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I thought about the length of the run, but that's not it, unfortunately; it's 
a
very quick run, a few seconds at the most.
I ran it via the console just to double-check anyway:

Chef Client finished, 2/21 resources updated in 3.87164273 seconds

So running it every 3 to 8 minutes shouldn't be an issue.

This is what my memory usage looks like in top, it's very stable:
Mem:    378392k total,   220848k used,   157544k free,    26532k buffers

I waited for chef-client to run on its own, it showed up at the top of top for
a couple of seconds and my free memory went down by about 20,000 KB, so I 
don't
think chef-client would trip over itself if it tried to start on top of an
existing instance of itself.

I looked at /var/log/kern.log and /var/log/syslog and didn't find any mention
of chef-client failing to run due to a memory issue.

For some reason at the time I was typing this, chef-client seemed to be 
running
steadily now so I'm even more confused. The only thing I did between the time 
I
posted this and now is start chef-client via the console.

I rebooted the Vagrant VM and see chef-client is already running. I gave it a
few minutes and saw it run on its own. Waited a bit more and saw it run again
just now... and it's still running fine.

So now I have a permanent chef-client background process, and every few 
minutes
there's a new process with a new pid that spawns, does its thing and
terminates. That's the behavior I was expecting. I'm not understanding what
changed since I first posted :|