As you may have notice, cdist 2.0.0 has been rewritten in Python due to performance issues with fork(). This article shows the first performance results of the new implementation

Background

All configurations were done using the productive configuration of the Systems Group in the ETH Zurich. All hosts were configured from a cable modem connection on my Lenovo X201, with 2 cores, 4 threads (Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU M 520 @ 2.40GHz) and 4 GiB RAM. The configuration contains 189 objects, of which 142 are of type __package. The duration was taken from cdist output and the measurements were taken by deploying to one, two, ..., thirty one hosts in parallel:

(
set --; 
  for host in ikq02.ethz.ch ikq03.ethz.ch ikq04.ethz.ch ikq05.ethz.ch \
  ikq06.ethz.ch ikq07.ethz.ch ikr01.ethz.ch ikr02.ethz.ch ikr03.ethz.ch \
  ikr05.ethz.ch ikr07.ethz.ch ikr09.ethz.ch ikr10.ethz.ch ikr11.ethz.ch \
  ikr13.ethz.ch ikr14.ethz.ch ikr15.ethz.ch ikr16.ethz.ch ikr17.ethz.ch \
  ikr19.ethz.ch ikr20.ethz.ch ikr21.ethz.ch ikr23.ethz.ch ikr24.ethz.ch \
  ikr25.ethz.ch ikr26.ethz.ch ikr27.ethz.ch ikr28.ethz.ch ikr29.ethz.ch \
  ikr30.ethz.ch ikr31.ethz.ch; 

  do
     set -- "$@" $host;  
     cdist -c ~/p/cdist-nutzung -p "$@";
  done
) 2>&1 | tee ~/benchmark-home

The results

Deploying to one host took 72 seconds, to three hosts 77 seconds, to 6 hosts 108 seconds and to 31 hosts 282 seconds, as can be seen in the following graph:

Cdist graph

In a sequential run, it would have taken 2232 seconds to deploy to 31 hosts. At higher parallel configurations (>10), it can be seen that cdist becomes CPU bound.

Although deploying to 31 hosts takes much longer than 1 host, it is still much faster than the linear case.

Conclusion

  • 72 seconds is still pretty long for one run, but can easily be improved by comparing the configuration against the cache and only run the new parts (or nothing if rerunning)
  • Cdist can deploy to more than 30 hosts on 2 cores/4 threads within 5 minutes
  • As cdist runs massively parallel, it can utilise all existing CPUs
  • And even more important: cdist can scale out, if you add more CPUs (or machines), it can simply use them to deploy to more machines in parallel