Ansible was pretty slow for me too. Then I discovered pipelining=True :)

mpdehaan2 · on Oct 2, 2014

Here's a good blog post on the subject:

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

If you want to use paramiko (like Fabric does), you can -c paramiko too. This mode came first, but -c ssh offers more features and can be just as quick.

nivertech · on Oct 2, 2014

What pipelining=True does?

EDIT: nevermind, found it:

http://docs.ansible.com/intro_configuration.html#pipelining