Ansible is a favorite among system administrators and DevOps engineers. It automates configuration, deployment, and orchestration. It’s powerful, flexible, and easy to use.
But there’s a problem many users eventually face—playbook performance.
A playbook that should finish in minutes may take much longer. As your infrastructure scales, even small inefficiencies become big issues.
It’s not just an inconvenience. Slow playbooks delay deployments, affect CI/CD pipelines, and frustrate teams trying to move fast.
The good news? There are proven methods to reduce execution time and make your Ansible playbooks faster. No need for complex rewrites. Just smart adjustments.
Here are 8 ways to speed up your Ansible playbooks without cutting corners or sacrificing clarity.
Identify Slow Tasks with Callback Plugins
Before optimizing, you must know where time is being wasted. That’s where task profiling comes in.
Some tasks may seem harmless but are silently dragging down your execution. Callback plugins give you visibility into which tasks take the longest to run.
With this information, you can focus on the real issues. You may discover that one task takes up half the run time. Or that tasks inside a loop are adding significant overhead.
Profiling isn’t about guessing. It’s about understanding where your playbook slows down and acting with purpose.
Once you know the trouble spots, targeted improvements become easy. You’ll avoid wasting time optimizing what isn’t broken.
Disable Fact Gathering
Ansible collects system facts by default. This happens at the beginning of each play. It provides detailed data about each managed host.
In many cases, those facts aren’t even used.
Fact gathering can take up a lot of time—especially when working with many hosts. Disabling this feature for plays that don’t need system information can result in immediate speed gains.
It’s a simple but powerful change. By turning off automatic fact collection, you remove unnecessary steps from your playbook.
You can always gather facts later, only when and where they’re needed. This makes your playbook leaner and more focused.
Configure Parallelism
Ansible handles multiple hosts at once using parallelism. But the default settings are conservative. This slows down performance when working with large inventories.
By increasing the number of hosts Ansible processes at the same time, you reduce total runtime significantly. It’s like opening more checkout lanes in a busy store. Everyone gets served faster.
You won’t always need high levels of parallelism. But when you do, it makes a major difference.
Make sure your system can handle the extra workload. Too much parallelism on a low-resource machine can create new problems.
Balanced properly, this approach delivers one of the fastest and easiest improvements.
Configure SSH Optimization
Since Ansible uses SSH to connect to remote systems, the efficiency of that connection matters.
Every task can involve a connection setup and teardown. That adds time. Especially when running many tasks or managing lots of hosts.
Optimizing SSH behavior helps reduce connection delays. It ensures Ansible doesn’t waste time doing repetitive connection handshakes.
The idea is simple—less connection overhead means faster automation. SSH becomes a tool, not a bottleneck.
When your network environment supports it, these adjustments can save seconds on every task. That adds up quickly across hundreds of runs.
Small changes in connection handling can have a large impact on playbook speed.
Disable Host Key Checking in a Dynamic Environment
Security matters. But sometimes security features work against speed—especially in highly dynamic setups.
In environments where new servers are created and destroyed frequently, host key checking becomes a source of delay. Each unknown host prompts a verification step that interrupts playbook execution.
When machines are short-lived or automatically generated, those checks are more of a nuisance than a safeguard.
By disabling this process, Ansible can connect to new machines instantly. It skips the prompt and avoids the disruption.
This is particularly useful in cloud deployments or test labs. Environments where hosts come and go quickly benefit most.
For long-lived production environments, a different approach is recommended. But for dynamic use cases, this method boosts speed without adding complexity.
Use Pipelining
Pipelining improves how tasks are delivered to the remote systems. Normally, Ansible sends temporary files to each host, runs the task, and then cleans up.
This takes time—especially on slower networks or when running many tasks.
With pipelining, tasks are sent more efficiently. Fewer file transfers. Fewer setup steps. Less waiting.
This streamlined approach cuts out redundant actions. It turns a bulky process into a smooth operation.
It’s not always enabled by default. But once active, it creates a noticeable improvement in playbook performance.
The best part? It doesn’t require changing your playbooks. Just your configuration. One switch, and your tasks get a performance boost.
Use Execution Strategies
Ansible includes different ways to control task execution order. Most playbooks run with the default approach, which processes all hosts step by step, task by task.
That’s safe and clear—but not always the fastest.
There are alternative strategies that allow more flexible execution. One approach lets hosts move ahead with the next task as soon as they’re done with the previous one.
This can significantly reduce overall playbook duration. Hosts don’t sit idle while waiting for others to catch up.
For independent tasks that don’t rely on shared state, these strategies are a better fit.
You gain speed by letting each machine move at its own pace. No one gets held back.
Choosing the right strategy based on your tasks makes your automation smarter and more responsive.
Use Async Tasks
Not every task needs to be completed before the next one starts. Some can run in the background.
Think about tasks like waiting for a service to restart, syncing files, or performing a long system update. These don’t need to block the rest of your playbook.
Async tasks let you start those operations and move on. Ansible checks in later, only if needed.
This reduces bottlenecks. You avoid holding up other actions while waiting for one slow operation to complete.
It’s about respecting time. Yours and your system’s.
Not all tasks should run asynchronously. But for the right ones, the benefits are clear.
Use this method where appropriate, and your playbooks will run faster without cutting corners.
One Time I Sped Up a Playbook (Personal Story)
A client once complained about a deployment playbook that ran over half an hour. The goal was to streamline their staging environment setup.
At first, it wasn’t clear what the issue was. The playbook looked fine on the surface.
We started by profiling the tasks. It turned out that several were unnecessarily collecting facts. Others were waiting on SSH connections that kept resetting.
No one had reviewed the configuration in months.
We made a few changes: disabled fact gathering, turned on pipelining, and increased the parallelism.
The difference was instant. What once took 30 minutes now finished in under 10. The development team could now push updates faster and more frequently.
That single improvement lifted a major pain point from their workflow.
Sometimes, it’s not about rewriting everything. It’s about knowing what to adjust—and why it matters.
Conclusion
Playbook speed isn’t just about shaving seconds—it’s about making automation effective.
Every improvement you make has a ripple effect. Faster playbooks mean quicker deployments, smoother rollouts, and happier teams.
The beauty of these optimizations is that most don’t require new tools. You’re working smarter with what you already have.
Start by identifying where time is being lost. Then remove the unnecessary steps. Focus on efficient connections, smarter task management, and only gathering what’s truly needed.
Each change builds on the next. Together, they create a faster, more responsive Ansible experience.
Now that you know these 8 ways to speed up your Ansible playbooks, which one will you try first?
