chown recursively with file module is very slow

[Thomas Steinbach]

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?

[Brian Coca]

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

--
Brian Coca