How to make a persistent SFTP connection in Laravel?

I'm using SFTP driver as my default storage driver and I have an endpoint that loads avatars of resources ( a lot) in the system form the files server and displays them with the right headers..

From stepping through codes, it seems almost every call of the endpoint creates a new ssh connection. This is causing the ssh connection to be closed by the server due to too many connections.

Is there a way to make it persistent so it gets reused each time?

via Chebli Mohamed