[myrandomcomment]

"For example, the Windows codebase has over 3.5 million files and is over 270 GB in size."

Okay, so this is a networking issue. Or is it a stick everything in the same branch issue?

Whatever the reason here the issue is pure size vs. network pipe, pure and simple. Hum, when can I get a laptop with a 10GBaseT interface?

One of the issue with the way they are doing this (only grab files when needed) is you cannot really work offline anymore.