For a few months I had no time to invest in puppet and I ended migrating three minor versions of puppet. Namely from 0.24.4 to 0.24.7; three minor versions that moved puppet forward and caused some havoc on my systems.

With the new version Webrick’s performance was even worse than before. Plugins took forever to sync and most client just gave up with a timeout while retrieving plugins.

So the update was also motivation enough to switch to mongrel plus nginx. The instructions at puppet’s wiki are good enough. Once every thing was working properly the performanced skyrocketed, with mongrel my clients fetch and run its catalogs in a fraction of the time required with webrick; Hooray!

Only a issue with my prior client access control, had to disable any IP restrictions on fileserver.conf using Allow *. The issue has to do with nginx and mongrel unable to properly communicate the Ip of the client and seems fixed since a month ago.