chef-client runs slow from a Chef DK PowerShell prompt

[tpetchel]

Description

I'm relaying a report from a user who's getting started with Chef on an Azure instance. The user is going through Learn the basics, where you run chef-client --local-mode to get a feel for how Chef works. I understand this is not how you typically run Chef in practice.

This issue isn't directly related to Azure; it's simply where we discovered it. (running on a Standard DS1 v2 instance)

Given this basic recipe (call it web.rb)

powershell_script 'Install IIS' do
  code 'Add-WindowsFeature Web-Server'
  guard_interpreter :powershell_script
  not_if "(Get-WindowsFeature -Name Web-Server).Installed"
end

service 'w3svc' do
  action [:enable, :start]
end

• It takes up to 40 minutes for chef-client --local-mode web.rb to complete when run from a Chef DK PowerShell prompt. (when IIS is not yet installed)
• It takes 5 minutes to run the command a second time. (when IIS is already installed)
• From a standard PowerShell prompt, it takes about a minute to run the recipe the first time; less than 10 seconds to run it again.
• The underlying PowerShell commands complete in about the same time when run from a standard PowerShell prompt.

ChefDK Version

$ chef --version
Chef Development Kit Version: 2.0.28
chef-client version: 13.2.20
delivery version: master (17c1b0fed9be4c70f69091a6d21a4cbf0df60a23)
berks version: 6.2.0
kitchen version: 1.16.0
inspec version: 1.31.1

Platform Version

Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

Replication Case

1. Bring up 2 Windows Server instances. The issue was seen on Azure Standard DS1 v2 instances.
2. On the first instance:
   1. Install Chef DK
   2. Add the recipe above to web.rb
   3. From a Chef DK PowerShell prompt, run chef-client --local-mode two times
   4. Note the time it takes to complete. We've seen 40 minutes for the first run; 5 minutes for the second.
3. From the second instance:
   1. Repeat the steps from (2) but from a standard PowerShell prompt. We've seen 1 minute for the first run; < 10 seconds for the second.

[tyler-ball]

Thanks for forwarding this report @tpetchel - getting this moved to the correct repo and triaged.

Chef (and Ruby) on Windows is slow and it really sucks. But thank you for the repro that shows there is a distinct slowness using the customer powershell prompt versus a regular powershell prompt. That is something we can go investigate.