On Python 2.x, operations on pthread objects with a timeout set actually
cause internal polling. When polling fails to yield a positive result,
it quickly backs off to a 50ms loop, which results in a huge amount of
latency throughout.

Instead, give up using Queue.Queue.get(timeout=...) and replace it with
the UNIX self-pipe trick. Knocks another 45% off my.yml in the Ansible
examples directory against a local VM.

This has the potential to burn a *lot* of file descriptors, but hell,
it's not the 1940s any more, RAM is all but infinite. I can live with
that.

This gets things down to around 75ms per playbook step, still hunting
for additional sources of latency.