Have you tried turning on pipelining in ansible.cfg? Details here: http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_configuration.html#pip...

>Changing the contents of one file can take ~10 minutes.

O_o

That kind of simple operation just zipped by for me on Ansible 1.6, 1.8, 1.9, and 2.0. The only noticeably slow kinds of operations for me are generally the package installs (understandably). I don't use a ton of variables in my templates, though.

I have quite a few variables, yes. One of the files I change frequently is an external configuration file filled with credentials which is managed through variables. It looks something like this:

    {% for cred in credentials %}
    {{cred.key}}: {{cred.value}}
    {% endfor %}

hey, kind of off-topic, but wouldn't you be able to like this?

  {{ credentials | to_nice_json }}

I'm curious to hear this too. We use Ansible to manage a fleet of a few thousand hosts, and runs take hours and hours and hours.

speed has been both better and worse, so depends a lot on what your playbook is doing, size of your inventory, vars, etc

the only answer i can give you is: test.

We do try to keep decent performance, but this is not our main focus.

I use around 1-3 variables per module and 4-5 modules per playbook. Other than that, the actual tasks are trivial (install package x etc.)