Rocky 9 instances take a long time to deploy

Problem / Opportunity Statement

Recently, I was seeing new Rocky Linux 9 instances take about 6 minutes to finish setup. @jlf599 was also seeing 5-7 minutes. @zacharygraber saw one take 18 minutes. See this Slack conversation for background and some Ansible profiling.

These long deployment times happen even with recently-updated images (with no package updates to install).

We want these instances to reliably finish setup in under 5 minutes.

Resolution

Figure out how to make these finish setup faster. It's just a guess, but maybe virt-sysprep (in the image build pipeline) is deleting some local package cache that DNF needs to rebuild the next time it runs.