Speed Up SSH

by Cheng Long

Recently I worked on a project where executing remote commands is very slow to start. This is expected because an SSH connection has to be established first.

$ time ssh server exit
ssh server exit  0.04s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 7.901 total

It took nearly 8 seconds to ssh into server.

That's slow!

After a bit of googling, there is an elegant way to speed this up. Simply put this at the bottom of your ~/.ssh/config.

Host *
  Compression yes
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h:%p
  ControlPersist 4h
  ServerAliveInterval 60

What this does is to try to share the master connection via a socket with multiple ssh sessions. It falls back to creating a new one if one does not already exist. The socket file is defined by ControlPath. ControlPersist 4h specifies that keep the master connection in background for four hours after the client connection is closed. ServerAliveInterval 60 means that the client will wait for 60s to send a message to the server (if no data has been received during this period) to keep the connection alive.

Create sockets directory

$ mkdir ~/.ssh/sockets

Running time ssh server exit again won't see any difference. But look into ~/.ssh/sockets, a socket file is created.

srw-------  1 user group    0 Dec  4 22:12 user@***.***.***.***:22

Try again

$ time ssh server exit
ssh server exit  0.01s user 0.00s system 40% cpu 0.027 total

Now it takes less than 0.5% of 8 seconds.

What's interesting is that, this config not only speeds up SSH connections, but also git, if you're authenticating with SSH.