Why are git operations on forked repos so much slower? Edited

[John Hamel]

Background:

My company has a self-hosted Bitbucket setup. We would like to have developers work in their own forks for added safety and to keep branches in the main repo under control. However, git operations on a forked repo are roughly an order of magnitude slower, making this a poor option.

Situation:

For example, I have copies of both the main repo and a synced fork on my machine. With both repos in the same state and already up to date, a simple `git fetch` takes 5 seconds on the base repo and 37-61 on the fork.

Question:

Why is this, and is there any way we can improve the situation?