Accelerating Git Clone Speed Using Gitee Mirror and Submodule Optimization

Downloading code from GitHub in China often tops out at about 20 KB/s, which is acceptable for small projects but painfully slow for larger repositories with many submodules.

This article presents a practical method to increase download speed to roughly 1–2 MB/s by leveraging the Gitee (码云) platform as a mirror for GitHub repositories.

1. Use Gitee’s repository mirroring

The process requires a GitHub account and a Gitee account. First, fork the desired GitHub project to your own GitHub account ( fork ). Then, log into Gitee, click the "Add Project" (+) button, choose "Migrate GitHub project", link your GitHub account, and select the repository to migrate. Finally, clone the repository from Gitee using the Gitee URL ( clone ), which provides download speeds measured in MB/s.

After migration, you no longer need to keep a night‑long clone running.

Step 1: Create a new repository on Gitee

(Image illustrating repository creation)

Step 2: Example with a GitHub repository

https://github.com/PX4/Firmware.git (illustrated with screenshots)

Step 3: Configure the remote URL

(Image showing remote URL setup)

Step 4: Complete the migration

(Image showing final steps)

2. Speed up submodule downloads

When a project contains submodules, a standard clone does not automatically fetch them because they reside at separate URLs. After cloning the main project, run:

git submodule update --init --recursive

This command pulls the submodule code from its original locations, which may still be on GitHub and thus limited to 20 KB/s. To accelerate this, apply the same mirroring technique to each submodule:

Identify the submodule URLs used by the project.

Fork each submodule repository to your GitHub account, then migrate it to Gitee.

Replace the original submodule URLs in the main project with the new Gitee URLs.

Run git submodule update --init --recursive again to fetch the submodules from Gitee at higher speeds.

These steps significantly reduce the time required to download large projects with many dependencies.

Appendix

References for modifying submodule URLs:

https://blog.csdn.net/wangjia55/article/details/24400501

https://www.jianshu.com/p/c81e2bd377ad

https://blog.csdn.net/qq_22630169/article/details/74236535