Ok it makes sense that I need at least one checkout of all the
objects. But still it seems that when I branch and publish via http it
wants to upload zillions of objects.

For example see the attached webkit-http.txt log. I think there is
some bug in the http push transport as if the transport is ssh it's
much *much* faster:

x61:~/aplix/webkit-test/webkit% git-config remote.origin.url
ssh://git.webvm.net/srv/git/webkit
x61:~/aplix/webkit-test/webkit% git push origin deleteme
Counting objects: 5, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 289 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://git.webvm.net/srv/git/webkit
 * [new branch]      deleteme -> deleteme
x61:~/aplix/webkit-test/webkit%

I need http:// to work as some of the engineers I work with are behind
a "corporate firewall" that doesn't allow ssh://. Crazy, I know.