Distributing static content

[Mike McGrath]

Over the last couple of weeks we've been using puppet to distribute 
static content across some of our application servers and proxy servers.

Static content might include the new static webpage or an application 
like our accounts system.

This has proved to be a bit of an issue.  Puppet wasn't really designed 
to do this and as such puts a noticeable load on the boxes while running 
as well as causing longer runs.  Puppet works for this but we're 
currently into it managing thousands of files and initial deploys take a 
long time :)  In the past we'd discussed moving some things (like 
turbogears apps) around using rpms.  We can do that with tg pretty 
easily.  But what about other static content, images, things like that?

This needs to be scriptable from start to finish, here's the options as 
I see them:

1.  Straight nfs mount (boo)
2. nfs mount to cron copy the files
3. recursive wget to an http store somewhere
4. rsync via ssh keys or rsync server (I'm currently leaning towards this)
5. Figure out how to make puppet more efficient with large numbers of files.


We've got a whole pool of sysadmins on this list.  How do you deal with 
these issues in your current environments?

    -Mike