Set SSH connection timeout

I'm trying to cut down the time ssh is trying to open a connection to a host. If I put for example ssh www.google.com it takes very long until the prompt comes back.

I read about using ssh -o ConnectTimeout=10 www.google.com instead, but even this takes very long. Is there maybe a number of attemps I can modify to decrease the blocking time?

The problem may be that ssh is trying to connect to all the different IPs that www.google.com resolves to. For example on my machine:

# ssh -v -o ConnectTimeout=1 -o ConnectionAttempts=1 www.google.com
OpenSSH_5.9p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8t 18 Jan 2012
debug1: Connecting to www.google.com [173.194.43.20] port 22.
debug1: connect to address 173.194.43.20 port 22: Connection timed out
debug1: Connecting to www.google.com [173.194.43.19] port 22.
debug1: connect to address 173.194.43.19 port 22: Connection timed out
debug1: Connecting to www.google.com [173.194.43.18] port 22.
debug1: connect to address 173.194.43.18 port 22: Connection timed out
debug1: Connecting to www.google.com [173.194.43.17] port 22.
debug1: connect to address 173.194.43.17 port 22: Connection timed out
debug1: Connecting to www.google.com [173.194.43.16] port 22.
debug1: connect to address 173.194.43.16 port 22: Connection timed out
ssh: connect to host www.google.com port 22: Connection timed out

If I run it with a specific IP, it returns much faster.

EDIT: I've timed it (with time) and the results are:

• www.google.com - 5.086 seconds
• 173.94.43.16 - 1.054 seconds

The ConnectTimeout option allows you to tell your ssh client how long you're willing to wait for a connection before returning an error. By setting ConnectTimeout to 1, you're effectively saying "try for at most 1 second and then fail if you haven't connected yet".

The problem is that when you connect by name, the DNS lookup can take several seconds. Connecting by IP address is much faster, and may actually work in one second or less. What sinelaw is experiencing is that every attempt to connect by DNS name is failing to occur within one second. The default setting of ConnectTimeout defers to the linux kernel connect timeout, which is usually pretty long.