chown recursively with file module is very slow

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1

Hi, I want to ensure that a directory and all its children belongs to a user/group. Normally I would do following with Ansible:

file: dest: /path/to/dir owner: userx group: groupx recurse: yes

However this approach takes in my case about 10 minutes or more, because the folder contains recursively hundreds of subfolders and thousands of files. With the following approach this task takes me just seconds:

command: "chown -R userx:groupx /path/to/dir" changed_when: false

Why is the Ansible native approach so much slower? Is it because it checks the state before/after the (possible) change? Or is there a faster good practice approach with Ansible?

2

that is exactly it, ansible checks each and every file/dir in the
tree, 'chown -R ' does not, it just sets it.