Ansible is a great configuration management tool. But without configuring it correctly, you might face different issues, such as random disconnections (depends on the infrastructure you are relying on) and slowness.

On this article, I’ll show you how to optimize your ansible by simple configurations on the ansible.cfg file. These optimizations will grant ansible the possibility to handle network disconnetions, and even make ansible playbook runs faster.

Increase your default timeout for ssh commands by the configuration below

[persistent_connection]
connect_timeout = 60
command_timeout = 60

By default, ansible is making a new SSH connection for every task it runs. You can change this default by the ControlPersist configuration on ansible.cfg. With this configuration you can edit the SSH connection duration, which will avoid ansible to reconnect to hosts for every single task. Ansible will use the same connection for the time you’ll set.

[ssh_connection]
ssh_args = -o ControlMaster=auto -o ControlPersist=120s
retries = 5

Make sure you put the configuration above under the block [ssh_connection]! The retries=5 part will guide ansible to keep reconnecting in case of connection failure. The final step is to configure your ssh connections to run in “pipelining” mode as in the example below.

[ssh_connection]
pipelining = True

Enabling the pipelining mode on your ansible.cfg will reduce the amount of SSH connections that required to execute a module on the remote server, by executing many ansible modules without actual file transfer. Please notice when using “sudo:” operations you must first disable ‘requiretty’ in /etc/sudoers on all managed hosts.

Unfortunately,  Ansible is operating much slower on Windows hosts because of:

• WINRM is much slower than SSH.
• No appropriate optimization configuration on ansible.cfg for Windows.

We can still put the configurations below, to improve the timeouts for Ansible. But you should understand the cons I have mentioned above.

[defaults]
ansible_winrm_operation_timeout_sec = 120
ansible_winrm_read_timeout_sec = 150
timeout=60