A few months ago I posted about inconsistent performance when running capistrano under Ruby 1.9 when SSH traffic was routed through a gateway host. This problem appears to have been solved in a recent commit to net-ssh-gateway (kudos to Mat Trudel).

I discovered this when installing capistrano 2.6.0. Reading through the updates I saw some promising references to a thread deadlocking issue the existed under Ruby 1.9. After installing the new version of capistrano (and net-ssh-gateway) I re-ran the tests described in my previous post, and sure enough, the improvement is outstanding!

  real user sys
min 2.75s 0.78s 0.22s
max 7.17s 1.51s 0.43s
mean 3.76s 0.91s 0.26s
stddev 1.22s 0.14s 0.04s
median 3.33s 0.86s 0.24s

(Full runtime data.)

Congratulations and my gratitude are due to the team of people presently maintaining capistrano, net-ssh-gateway, etc.