Chef works atop ssh, which – while the gold standard for cryptographically secure systems management – is computationally expensive to the point where most mast

Chef works atop ssh, which – while the gold standard for cryptographically secure systems management – is computationally expensive to the point where most master servers fall over under the weight of 700-1500 clients. It doesn't have to be this way. The situation where one host repeatedly needs to talk to hundreds via SSH is precisely where the SSH ControlMaster socket shines. This saves you a ton of overhead by not having to start up and tear down the session every time you want to issue a command via SSH. I often use this trick on busy Nagios servers that execute many active checks via SSH -- it works well.