Fix High VPS Latency on Ubuntu by Replacing SSH with Mosh
Mobile Shell (Mosh) is a free and fast remote terminal application. It supports roaming, works with intermittent connections, and provides smart local echo and line editing for user keystrokes. You already know SSH; Mosh is designed for the typical interactive use cases of SSH. Because Mosh is more robust and responsive—especially over Wi‑Fi, cellular, and long-distance links—it’s considered a strong alternative for interactive SSH terminals. Mosh is also available for almost all GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS, and Android systems.
What Is Mosh and How Does It Work?
Mosh is free command-line software used to connect from a client machine to a server over the Internet to run a remote terminal. It’s available on GNU/Linux, BSD, macOS, Solaris, Android, Chrome, and iOS. Mosh is similar to SSH but adds features specifically aimed at improving usability for mobile users.
Mosh is smarter than SSH. While an SSH client waits for a TCP response from the server before displaying your input, Mosh shows your keystrokes in real time and can even provide underlined input prediction. The mosh program first connects to user@host via SSH to establish the session. As you know, SSH may prompt the user for a password or use public key authentication to log in. But Mosh then starts a mosh-server process on the server machine (under your user account). In this way, compared with a traditional SSH connection, Mosh brings some clear advantages.
On links with long latency or unreliable connectivity, Mosh is faster and more responsive. So it’s fair to say Mosh is a solid replacement for SSH in many scenarios. When the connection drops, Mosh automatically tries to reconnect—even without you noticing.
Let’s review the key reasons to use Mosh instead of SSH:
1- Mosh keeps your session alive even if your IP address changes.
2- When your network comes back after losing Internet connectivity, or after you suspend and resume your system, Mosh restores the connection to your remote machine.
3- You don’t need superuser (root) privileges to install or run Mosh.
4- The Mosh client logs into the server via SSH, using the same credentials as before.
5- Mosh runs inside your existing terminal emulator, such as xterm, gnome-terminal, urxvt, Terminal.app, iTerm, emacs, screen, or tmux.
6- Unlike SSH, Mosh does not fill up network buffers, so Control-C can always stop a runaway process. For example, if you accidentally request a 200MB file instead of 100MB, you can stop it immediately by pressing CTRL+C.
Advantages of the Mosh Shell
Now that you know more about Mosh Shell, if you’re still unsure whether to replace SSH with it, check the list below:
1- Mosh is highly efficient.
2- Mosh works well on low-bandwidth or intermittent connections.
3- Like Eternal Terminal (ET), connections persist across Wi‑Fi changes and temporary outages.
4- Mosh lets you keep typing even while SSH and ET are still waiting for a command to complete or for the connection to be re-established.
5- It has built-in mechanisms to handle packet loss.
6- Mosh can log in using the same familiar methods as SSH.
How to Install Mosh Shell on Ubuntu 20.04
To install the Mosh package on your Ubuntu 20.04 system, simply run the following commands:
apt-get update -yapt-get install mosh -yNote： If you are running a firewall such as iptables, manually open these ports with the following command:
sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -p udp --dport 60000:61000 -j ACCEPTConfigure Mosh Shell as an SSH Alternative on Ubuntu Linux
Once Mosh Shell is installed, you can start using it. Run the following command to connect to your remote system:
mosh root@Your_IP_AddressYou should now be able to connect to your remote system. You can also check the installed Mosh version by running:
mosh--versionMosh supports many options. To see all available options, type:
mosh--help