I have done a bit of searching and have found no viable answers. I setup a small group of servers. I connect from my workstation using a dsa ssh key. I have noticed that using my ssh key takes significantly longer to authenticate than a general username and password. The purpose for the ssh keys, is scripting. I would like to know if there are any known ways of tweaking the performance for ssh key login.

example...
If I have a script that I execute on one machine, that goes out and runs "uptime" on 9 other machines, I would prefer is be quick. As it stands, the ssh key authentication takes a while. So over the course of about 30 seconds I get the results from all 9 machines. Anybody know a way to speed this up? Seems slow.

you can set the option UseDNS to no on the sshd_config on /etc/ssh/

that way the server doesn't try to look up the remote host name and check that the resolved host name for the remote IP address maps back to the very same IP address

regards and have a good one