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Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

eieio.games

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Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying you should do this, but you can do this: https://gist.github.com/shmup/100a7529724cedfcda1276a65664dc...

Amusingly that looks less like "rubber duck debugging" and more like "socratic questions". Which certainly isn't a bad thing.

That is so true I wanted to "fix it", granted, I'm not even using these at the moment, but I appreciated the idea

https://github.com/shmup/metacog-skills/

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#302
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah no. Nobody is running TCP on that link, let alone SSH.

Once upon a time I worked on a project where we SSH'd into a satellite for debugging and updates via your standard electronics hobbiest-tier 915mhz radio. Performance was not great but it worked and was cheap.

ELRS?

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good chance you have other options. Regardless of how you feel about the company's head, Starlink would probably be one of them, with likely better performance than you're dealing with on ADSL. But you cannot just sue a company because their network connected software doesn't work well on slow networks. Let alone a project like OpenSSH. It would be like me suing a game studio because my PC doesn't meet thei…

Hey, it is one thing to buy a new computer, it is another thing to ask people to move. A better analogy is a bank redlining neighborhoods. The cost to run fiber to difficult rural locations pays itself easily if you look at a 25-year time span and is an order of magnitude less than building a new housing unit on the West Coast.

It's OSS with no warranty. You can compile it yourself with the option disabled. It's only ever on for pty connections (physical user with a keyboard), there's no added traffic for ttys.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#304
Am I missing something? This isn't what ssh's purpose is. Why should anyone care? We're talking about a game built to run over an encryption protocol? What are we even doing anymore? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but client-side option existing is secure design, really feels like it shouldn't be circumvented server-side without giving the client the choice to do so or not by default. Don't lobby for watering down security for convenience, especially for trivially important objectives, please?

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#305
Why not "amortise" the period of sending keystrokes -- buffer them in a queue, and process the queue for sending these on a regular (and short enough for the human at the client end feeling the interactivity) interval, so there's no latency difference between sending an 'a' vs a 'q' and so on. If we assume some average typing speed on the bell curve, say, around 250 keystrokes per minute, the queue can be picked for sending every 250 milliseconds or so. That solution wouldn't require injecting extra packets on the network. What am I missing?

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#307

I don't see how Claude helped the debugging at all. It seemed like the author knew what to do and it was more telling Claude to think about that. I've used Claude a bit and it never speaks to me like that either, "Holy Cow!" etc. It sounds more annoying than interacting with real people. Perhaps AIs are good at sensing personalities from input text and doesn't act this way with my terse prompts..

I think the blog post itself was partially written with LLMs, which explains some of the odd narrative style.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#308

Very interesting, I hadn't heard of this obfuscation before so it was well worth clicking. Another good trick for debugging ssh's exact behavior is patching in "None" cipher support for your test environment. It's about the same work as trying to set up a proxy but lets you see the raw content of the packets like it was telnet. For terminal games where security does not matter but performance and scale does, just off…

Sadly, much fewer computer systems have telnet nowadays.

Also, port 21 is often blocked.

Re: Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?

#309

Am I missing something? This isn't what ssh's purpose is. Why should anyone care? We're talking about a game built to run over an encryption protocol? What are we even doing anymore? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but client-side option existing is secure design, really feels like it shouldn't be circumvented server-side without giving the client the choice to do so or not by default. Don't lobby for watering down se…

Your security is safe. This game isn’t going to cause SSH to degrade.

I assume this is done for novelty. There is also Terminal coffee which is a coffee company that takes orders for delivery over SSH.

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