So, we all know that ruby’s memory management is sketchy at best, and the Puppet is generally slow. But how can we quantify that? One of the metrics which is important to my usage is that of verifying the permissions on a large number of files. To that end, I wrote a simple script to compare the performance of ensuring that the contents of a large directory of files are owned by a specific group. Before each test, I remove a temp directory, create a set of sequentially-named files with the wrong group ownership, and then correct the ownership. I then run the same command again to see how quickly it can verify the permissions – which should be the common case.
For the baseline, I use “find | xargs chgrp”, which is slightly slower than “chgrp -R”, but not much slower (and, in my mind, slightly more fair). I then use a simple CFEngine policy and a simple Puppet policy to do the same thing. The summary? Puppet is dog slow at file recursion, while CFEngine is nearly as fast as pure find. CFEngine actually uses less memory than the shell when you get to many files (probably due to the pipe to xargs), and Puppet wastes memory like it’s been surfing the web for weeks using an old version of Firefox.
