What is /var/lib/puppet/state good for?

asked 2013-11-13 10:23:37 -0600

xtraclass
31 ●1 ●2 ●5

What is the directory /var/lib/puppet/state good for? (on the puppet client side)

And why does state.yaml get soooo big sometimes (especially if you have several managed directories with recurse true) that the whole deploy process is getting very slow? What can one do to prevent that state.yaml gets so big? One can remove the files in that directory manually, but shouldn't that done by Puppet automatically?

answered 2013-11-15 00:53:31 -0600

ramindk

4606 ●54 ●71 ●126

How big is your state.yaml file? The largest one I have is 125k or about 3000 lines. Each resources takes three lines and looks like this.

File[/usr/share/mcollective/plugins/mcollective/agent/nrpe.rb]: 
  !ruby/sym synced: 2013-07-12 22:22:15.126216 +00:00
  !ruby/sym checked: 2013-11-15 06:33:55.369970 +00:00

Having Puppet sync large file dirs is adding three lines per file and that is the cause of your growth. However the deploy process being slow is because Puppet isn't built to be an rsync server which is how you're using it ... (more)