Chef-solo provisioner very slow to upload cookbooks

[James Bannan]

Hi all,

I'm using Packer 0.10.1 on Windows 10 to build a Windows 10 image on VirtualBox.

The template uses the chef-solo provisioner, and i'm seeing that the upload of the cookbooks is extremely slow. Slow, as in, about 30 minutes to upload 4 cookbooks.

It always works and never errors, but the process is extremely slow and painful. Any way of troubleshooting what's happening and hopefully fixing it?

[Sean Farrow]

Hi James,

 

What template are you using, is it possible to provide a link?

Cheers

Sean.

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[James Bannan]

Hi Sean,

Sure, the template is this one, authored by Matt Wrock:

https://github.com/mwrock/packer-templates/blob/master/vbox-2016.json

Based on some additional research, it looks like this is a long-standing issue with the performance of the WinRM transport in Packer.  However, I'm only trying to upload about 500KB to the VM.  30 minutes to upload seems excessive...

Thanks,

James

[James Bannan]

Just a quick update on this one - I ended up writing a short PowerShell script to download the cookbooks directly from the Chef Marketplace and extract them on the target VM.  This is working OK and I can bypass the cookbook upload, but it's not ideal as it precludes using Berkshelf to determine cookbook dependencies.