Ansible - profiling

Profiling Ansible

In order to do realistic and effective performance optimisation, one must always profile. This is true for all development. Collecting basic benchmarks from a test run and identifying slow and often-run sections is a key technique for improving performance, and also applies to Ansible.

If you are lucky enough to use Ansible 2, there’s already a profiler built in - you can enable it in your playbook with:

callback_whitelist = profile_tasks

If you are using Ansible 1.x, you can install a callback plugin. I prefer to put this in  /.ansible/callback_plugins/ so that it’s used on all my projects. To install it from https://github.com/jlafon/ansible-profile with these instructions:

mkdir callback\_plugins
cd callback\_plugins
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jlafon/ansible-profile/master/callback_plugins/profile_tasks.py

The next run of Ansible will then give a detailed breakdown of the steps and how long each one has taken. You can use this to find the slow runners and change them to work quicker, or to alter general Ansible configuration to improve performance.