[vacri]

If you think ssh negotiation is the slow point with ssh, have a look into 'persistent connections'

The below is an example setup of a session that persists for ten minutes after last logout. Subsequent ssh attempts (or new parallel ssh attempts) will piggyback onto the session and avoid the renegotiation delay.

  host *
    ControlPersist 10m
    ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%n:%p
    ControlMaster auto

[ryan_lane]

Hi. I'm the blog post author. The issue isn't SSH. I was running ansible-playbook on the local system using -c local. It wasn't using SSH at all.

[mpdehaan2]

Here's a rollup of lots of things you can tune:

http://www.ansible.com/blog/ansible-performance-tuning