chef-load is a tool written in Go that simulates load on a Chef Server from a configured number of nodes.
It is designed to be easy to use yet powerfully flexible and accurate in its simulation of the chef-client run.
It works well at this point but there is always room for improvement so please provide feedback.
To build chef-load you must have Go installed.
Ref: https://golang.org/dl/
Setup a GOPATH if you haven't already.
Ref: https://golang.org/doc/install#testing
mkdir ~/go-work
export GOPATH=~/go-work
Get and install chef-load
go get github.com/jeremiahsnapp/chef-load
It is easy to cross-compile chef-load for other platforms.
Options for $GOOS and $GOARCH are listed in the following link.
Ref: https://golang.org/doc/install/source#environment
The following command will create a chef-load executable file for linux amd64 in the current working directory.
env GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build github.com/jeremiahsnapp/chef-load
The client defined by "client_name" in the chef-load configuration file needs to be able to create clients.
By default only admin users can create clients so the recommendation is to set "client_name" and "client_key" to an admin user of the org.
If you want to use a regular user or even a regular client instead then you will need to use the knife-acl plugin to create a new group in the Chef Server, add the regular user or client to that group and then give the group the create permission on the clients container.
Print help.
chef-load --help
Generate a chef-load configuration file.
The configuration file uses TOML syntax and documents a lot of the flexibility of chef-load so please read it.
chef-load --sample-config > chef-load.conf
Configure at least "chef_server_url", "client_name" and "client_key" in chef-load.conf.
You can set the number of nodes and chef-client runs as command line options.
This is useful for quickly testing the chef-load configuration.
The following will make one node perform two chef-client runs.
chef-load --config chef-load.conf --nodes 1 --runs 2
Run chef-load using only the configuration file.
chef-load --config chef-load.conf