I think it's something that can be improved, yes. I'm not sure it's a bug, and I'm not sure it's really all that slow. We're talking about 0.5 seconds and maybe it could get down to 0.4? If you dig into the module I'm not sure what you would change. (Again, a fine discussion for ansible-devel probably? How would you solve it?)

In your case, managing a list of 80 users to be sure there or not, I might have suggested perhaps tagging that action and only running that every so often, but I do think that, in general, it wasn't a pressing thing for us.

There are going to be occasional tradeoffs to the way the task system does work (ability to be split declarative/imperative), but those are some of the prices to be had for the flexibility that can by (like "register:" versus the limitations of a server side compile up front).

I think I'm ok with that, all being said. It's how ansible came to be.

There are choices that you take building things one way versus another, and if we're down for time for a coffee and three spins around the office chair, or time for coffe and two spins around the office chair, it's still in statistical noise territory.

We have spent a lot of time optimizing the HECK out of the SSH transport, but no matter what, almost all deployments in any config tool, the majority of the time comes down to waiting on yum and apt. And yum and apt are brilliant and I love them, it's just where things lurk :)