Comment 2 for bug 1426023

I agree that it doesn't make sense to block the login updating the motd when we aren't actually going to display the motd. I'm not sure if this should be solved in pam_motd, or in openssh - perhaps openssh should be using different a separate PAM profile for interactive vs. non-interactive sessions; or maybe openssh needs to be calling pam_open_session() with the PAM_SILENT flag for non-interactive sessions. Either of these changes would let us avoid wasteful calls to update-motd when it won't be displayed. But pam, at least, is working as designed here.

And the inclusion of package information in the dynamic output is as originally requested by the server team. If the server team no longer wants this information in the motd then we can drop this, but then it should be dropped across the board.

As for the actual delays you're seeing: this would be expected the first time you sshed to a machine, but after the first run, the apt check results are aggressively cached. Is the behavior you're describing reproducible on subsequent ssh calls to the same machine? If so there's certainly a bug in update-notifier.

For reference:

$ time ssh localhost true

real 0m0.301s
user 0m0.030s
sys 0m0.002s
$