where does it end ?  if the DUT is choking, then ssh establishing the connection won't help with spawning of the shell ?  you'll still time out then ?

making sshd run all the time with higher priority should be easy to do, and it's not like it'd hurt if sshd was idle.

Right.  It doesn't hurt, but likely doesn't help either.

The special case that made me think of this is the errors we seem to get when we run

ssh <DUT> "touch <some-file>; reboot"

It *seems* that in a number of cases the ssh command fails.

In some experiment, I can make ssh fail (i.e. hang) with 

ssh <DUT> "reboot; sleep <T>"

with T = 0.1s.  It works with T = 0.05s.  So it's tight, and I am wondering if there are other situations in which we don't sufficiently prioritize sshd.

However:

1. It's not clear nice would help because there are other operations, like flushing dirty buffers to disk, which also compete

2. There are other ways of dealing this particular case.

So maybe it's not a good idea.  I enjoy using the bug tracker for my streams of consciousness.

Wouldn't help.