A developer building a high-performance SSH-based game discovered their server was sending ~90 packets per second during a test. The culprit was SSH keystroke timing obfuscation, a 2023 OpenSSH feature that adds 36-byte "chaff" packets every 20ms to hide typing patterns. This security measure, while valuable for privacy, introduced significant latency for a real-time application.

The overhead was confirmed by analyzing `tcpdump` logs and verbose SSH client output. The obfuscation feature is triggered when the server advertises the `[email protected]` extension. For a game targeting thousands of concurrent players, this default behavior created unnecessary CPU and bandwidth usage, directly impacting performance targets.

The developer found a server-side workaround by modifying the Go SSH library to stop advertising the `[email protected]` extension. This disables the chaff packets without requiring users to pass client-side flags. The fix highlights a common tension in developer tools: balancing default security with specialized performance needs.