Tuning puppetserver

The puppetserver is a great way to run the master service. It is simple to set up and maintain, and it also has great performance during the operation. Starting up can take a little while to initialize everything to that end.

There are only a few customizable settings that can impact performance. Seeing as puppetserver runs in the JVM, the most important tuning approach is to scale the heap. A small heap will increase the overhead for garbage collection. Therefore, you should use the -Xmx and -Xms Java options to allow the JVM to use large parts of your available memory for the aforementioned heap.

On Debian, these settings are found in /etc/default/puppetserver. It is sensible to pass the same value to both. A dynamic heap has little benefit because you cannot safely use any saved memory.