Ansible: Up and Running

Chapter 9. Making Ansible Go Even Faster

In this chapter, we will discuss strategies for reducing the time it takes Ansible to execute playbooks.

SSH Multiplexing and ControlPersist

If you’ve made it this far in the book, you know that Ansible uses SSH as its primary transport mechanism for communicating with servers. In particular, Ansible will use the system SSH program by default.

Because the SSH protocol runs on top of the TCP protocol, when you make a connection to a remote machine with SSH, you need to make a new TCP connection. The client and server have to negotiate this connection before you can actually start doing useful work. The negotiation takes a small amount of time.

When Ansible runs a playbook, it will make many SSH connections, in order to do things such as copy over files and run commands. Each time Ansible makes a new SSH connection to a host, it has to pay this negotiation penalty.

OpenSSH is the most common implementation of SSH and is almost certainly the SSH client you have installed on your local machine if you are on Linux or Mac OS X. OpenSSH supports an optimization called SSH multiplexing, which is also referred to as ControlPersist. When you use SSH multiplexing, then multiple SSH sessions to the same host will share the same TCP connection, so the TCP connection negotiation only happens the first time.

When you enable multiplexing:

• The first time you try to SSH to a host, OpenSSH starts a master connection.

• OpenSSH creates a Unix domain socket ...