Skip Gathering Facts in Ansible

Ansible

Red Hat Ansible There are Ansible playbooks which depend on the most up-to-date information found on each node. That’s where fact gathering is a much needed help. But there are also simpler more predefined playbooks, which don’t need fact gathering and can therefore gain performance if no facts are collected.

Why Fact Gathering in Ansible Takes Time

Fact gathering means Ansible runs a number of commands to confirm the most recent values for important indicators and parameters.

Run against my freshly installed RHEL 8 based PC, this takes roughly 4 seconds. Part of this can be to how RHEL is configured (and that it’s still a work in progress), but part of this amount of time is defined by the sheer number of facts: more than 1000!

Typical Facts Collected By Ansible This is not a complete list, I’m just giving you examples to indicate why facts collection may be time consuming:

• hardware parameters of remote system
• storage devices (types, models, sizes, capabilities)
• filesystems and logical volume managers (objects, types, sizes)
• OS distro information
• network devices and full list of their capabilities
• environment variables

Disable Fact Gathering in Ansible

Since I don’t really need to re-establish hardware specs or logical volumes layout of my RHEL 8 desktop every time I run some Ansible post-configuration, I decided to disable fact gathering and shave 4-5 sec at the start of each playbook run.

Simply specify this at the top of your Ansible playbook:

gather_facts: no

In on of my playbooks, this is how it looks:

##

- name: Baseline
  hosts: desktops
  gather_facts: no
  

This really made a noticeable difference. Have fun!

See Also

• Ansible
• Getting started with Ansible
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
• Create a Unix group with Ansible
• Specify User per Task in Ansible