Why is git svn fetch so slow?

This seems to be a problem of the windows port of 'git svn'. Or more specifically one of the perl libraries of 'git svn' on windows/cygwin.

cloning a 12MB 75 revision svn repo

  linux: 45 seconds
  windows (cygwin): 25 minutes

git svn fetch ( and clone) have to do the heavy lifting and create the entire repository, talking to svn and creating the git repository on your local machine. You may do it on the same server where the svn server is ( which is what I think you meant by locally), but still the git svn client has to process a lots of revisions, processing them one-by-one and creating the repo. 1000 revisions is a lot, it might take a while. Be patient and let it do its job. When you work on the repo, make sure you fetch / rebase often.

After going through the same thing, I found it's quite a bit faster on linux than it is with cygwin on windows. I'd give that a try.