An update, I bisected it down to this commit: 88a21979c5717e3f37b9691e90b6dbf2b94c751a fetch/pull: recurse into submodules when necessary Since this can be disabled with the --no-recurse-submodules switch, I tried that and indeed, even with the latest 1.7.7rc it becomes fast (~8mins) again. The strange part about this is that the repository does not have any submodules. Anyway, I hope that this can be useful to others since it is a workaround which speed things up enormously. Let me know if you have any other tests that you want me to perform, -Martin -- View this message in context: http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Git-is-not-scalable-with-too-many-refs-tp6456443p6774328.html Sent from the git mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html