SSH is great; it’s highly secure, and actually easier to use than insecure alternatives like rsh or Telnet. In fact, it’s so easy to integrate SSH with everything else you do that it’s commonplace to rely on it for all sorts of things. But oddly, that very ubiquity tends to reveal an unexpected problem when you try to use SSH for, say, accessing a revision-control system: merely connecting to the remote end and performing the handshaking necessary to set up the encrypted channel takes an appreciable amount of time.

So herewith instructions on how to eliminate that overhead.