You shouldn't be creating ssh connections all the time, but instead using persistent connection to each server that ansible opens once at the beginning, and reuses for all subsequent tasks.

See ControlPersist/ControlPath OpenSSH client configuration.

And for even more speedup, use Mitogen https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html

Never found this incredibly reliable - and if you change networks, sleep, or power off your machine, those connections die. Salt is just better at all of this imho.

Do you often do these things in the middle of running a playbook? I would hope not. :)

It's not meant to have the connections persist forever, just long enough for repeated short ssh connections to have almost no overhead, and therefore be much faster.

Yeah, good point.

I mean, I guess if you use a dedicated host, it's more reliable - but I've always just pushed from the client using Ansible whereas with Salt you have the master running the cloud running somewhere most usually.