I'm considering using Puppet or cfengine. Key factors are performance, and research on the internet suggests cfengine uses less memory and CPU cycles compared to puppet. However, puppet seems easier to use.

I need to manage several web servers, as well as handheld tablets and machines that will only connect to some central control servers periodically. All are Linux machines.

Would I be able to use either puppet or cfengine for this? And if so, does puppet still make poor use of resources? I'd like to use puppet because it seems simpler, but a lot of the articles I've found refer to cfengine 2 - is cfengine 3 easier to configure?

Thanks