I think the default settings for puppet agents are typically 30 minutes if I'm not mistaken. I've inherited a bit of a DevOps mess with some 600-700 nodes in various states of management.

In previous positions, there was a great hew and cry that the run intervals were increased from 30 minutes to 60 minutes... eventually every four hours for production resources.

In my current position, production nodes are provisioned to run puppet once daily as a rule, triggered by cron jobs at a pseudorandom minute between 0200 and 0400 defined at server provisioning time.

How do these intervals compare to what you've seen?