git-clone failures abound

I've been seeing several reports lately, from different users on various 
Linux platforms, with the same basic bug report

* "git:// clone of linus's repo times out after 10 minutes"

* someone says, "use rsync:// for the initial clone"

* "it works, thanks!"

People seems to note that this behavior only started recently.  I wonder 
if linux-2.6.git crossed some sort of size threshold that's too much for 
kernel.org CPU load to bear?  I wonder if git-clone is attempting to 
delta-ify, when it really should just be sending the objects in bulk?

	Jeff