"fossil clone" over wire is extremely slow for large repositories.

Compare:

    117.76s user 3.48s system 90% cpu 2:13.33 total

for clone from local file to local file and

    349.86s user 17.71s system 59% cpu 10:16.45 total

for clone from

Total network traffic is around 20MB (for a 40MB repository), so that would be 8min for the data transfer or 42KB/s, which is clearly not acceptable.