ssh hangs with high latency connection (connecting internationally)

Question

This is been making my programming really frustrating lately.

I´m in Argentina right now connecting to a U.S. server via SSH. Understandably, the pings are a bit higher here (around 200ms on average) so when I SSH into the server there is a slightly noticeable lag between each keystroke. This is fine and easy enough to work with.

What isn´t easy to work with is that about every 5 minutes or so, SSH will completely hang and take about 3-5 minutes to return back a prompt. I know the server is not bogged down because I can easily open several new connections while I´m waiting for one to return (in fact this is the only way I´ve been able to work). And when SSH finally comes back I can see it has actually been working away in the background (large file downloads was a good way to test this) but it just hasn´t been updating my screen.

Does anyone have an idea what might be causing this?

Few other facts: the server is Ubuntu and I'm connecting with Mac OS X. I have keepalive turned on in the SSH settings. It is most likely to hang when I hold down a key (for example a left or right arrow to scroll) which sends a lot of keys quickly. In fact I can reliably reproduce the hang by logging in and holding down any key like "a" - it never makes it past a full line of "a"'s before hanging. This just started when I connected internationally for the first time so I´m assuming it has something to do with that (latency?) but can´t say for sure.

Answer 1

Odd. I can't help you with your problem but I have a tip to make it less annoying: Use screen(1). This will keep your shell on the other end alive and you can continue whatever you were doing after reconnecting.

If you only need to run a command on the other side, I suggest to pass the command as an option to ssh (it will connect, run the command, display the result and disconnect).