Any advantage of using Salt commands vs cmd.run?

[mike r]

Wondering if execution time is faster using built in salt cmds vs cmd.run

salt target123 file.makedirs "/opt/mydir"  vs   salt target123 cmd.run "mkdir /opt/mydir"

is there any benefit of using salt cmd over native os cmds?

[Boris FELD]

Salt commands are platform and OS agnostics.

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[mike r]

gotcha thanks Boris. Is there any execution time benefit or is it a direct translator into a native OS cmd?

[David Boucha]

Salt uses Python's os.mkdir.  So that's what you could compare against.

[Seth Miller]

I guess that would depend on the command but I would say that any performance penalty for the abstracted Salt version would be minimal. A few more operations for conditionals and the like may have some impact won't make much of a difference.

Doing a very un-scientific test by timing the same operation in 2 different ways on the same minion come in nearly identical.

Personally, I try to always use the abstracted version if possible to avoid a re-write should I want to re-use a state for another OS. A minor performance penalty (even if there is one) is worth the abstraction to me.

~ $ time sudo salt 'REDACTED' file.makedirs '/tmp/test1/'
REDACTED:
    None


real 0m0.645s
user 0m0.481s
sys 0m0.057s


~ $ time sudo salt 'REDACTED' cmd.run "mkdir /tmp/test2"
REDACTED:


real 0m0.642s
user 0m0.495s
sys 0m0.042s

[Andrew Hammond]

For cases where salt is just running some python code, it's likely to be faster since it doesn't have the additional overhead of starting another process. However I think that worrying about execution time is a distraction when compared to and reliability. Also, if you're doing it right (using states), the real gain comes from the ability to _not_ execute commands.

A