Comment by jstimpfle

git clone --bare --depth=1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux

Takes 21 seconds on my work laptop, indeed a corporate Windows laptop with antivirus installed. Majority of that time is simply network I/O. The cloned repository is 276 MB large.

Actually checking the kernel out takes 90 seconds. This amounts to creating 99195 individual files, totaling 2 GB of data. Expect this to be ~10 times faster on a Linux file system.

So what's your problem?