I have opened ticket 263 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/263) to track nice to have optimizations. I had originally thought tarring/untarring files to upload would offer some nice speedups.
After spending some time implementing this, I discovered that the tar/untar takes as long as uploading the extra file, and requires a fair bit of reworking of the code. I was able to accomplish the same speedup by grouping the chmod, execute, and cleanup into a single exec. Further optimization could be accomplished by using a single tmp directory throughout a play, per host, and then cleaning it out at the end.
Two other possible optimizations are to keep ssh and sftp connections open throughout the play, if the fork level is not too high.
If anyone has any suggestions on other ways to speed up the setup & per taks times, I’d like to try to test them out.
Matthew