We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.6.6 is now ready! The new release has improved performance and reliability, especially on the CFEngine Enterprise backend, as well a stability and performance improvements across Unix and Windows agent platforms! Given that this is the sixth maintenance release in the 3.6 branch, the focus is primarily on stability and performance enhancements.
Enterprise report collection enhancements
CFEngine 3.6.6 significantly improves the performance and reliability of the Enterprise reporting backend in several ways. A known issue causing higher CPU usage of PostgreSQL has been resolved. Secondly, the PostgreSQL maintenance settings (known as “vacuuming”) have been optimized to reduce the disk fragmentation and thus supporting policies with frequently changing promises much better. For example, if there are frequent uses of if_elapsed in the policy, this optimization will make a significant difference. In some instances, the Enterprise hub would log errors about “status_pkey” to syslog, due to duplicate reports coming from clients. This has also been resolved in 3.6.6. Finally, environments where client-initiated reporting is enabled (known as “call collect”) will see big scalability enhancements. Call collect has been scale tested to several thousand clients over a long period of time.
Other changes
Windows process matching has been optimized to use internal WMI calls instead of relying on the wmic binary. This not only makes process listing more reliable, but also much more performant as CFEngine will no longer need to create additional processes every time a process table is needed. Dependencies like OpenSSL, Apache and PHP have been upgraded to their latest maintenance release to take advantage of new stability and security fixes.
As usual, you can find a more detailed list of changes in the Community Change Log and Enterprise Change Log.
Upgrading?
If you’re upgrading from a previous release, check out the upgrade documentation for guidelines to make the process as smooth as possible.
Get it!
As always, you can download CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.6 packages for the supported platforms. If you are using the Community Edition, we provide you with source code and Linux packages! We hope you enjoy 3.6.6, and we look forward to hearing about your experience in the CFEngine Google Group!
