I was able to reproduce the timing issue consistently on a CentOS VM by changing it to just:

    package nokogiri_requirement do
       action :install
    end

When I went back to the ```end.run_action(:install)``` method and ran it against a CentOS 6 EC2 instance I hit an issue with the vanilla image not having gcc and make installed.

Should we stick with just adding those 2 onto the list like: 

    %W{gcc make libxml2 libxslt libxml2-devel libxslt-devel}.each do |nokogiri_requirement|
        package nokogiri_requirement do
          action :nothing
        end.run_action(:install)
      end

Or would it make sense to look at including the build-essential cookbook in this case?  I am not crazy about adding another cookbook dependency - but I also hate to re-invent the wheel either.