Our current implementation of copying files onto the minion is very slow if the source contains a lot of small files and directories. A good example is .git directory. Some numbers:

task-rpmlint contains 246 files and copying takes 12 seconds
task-upgradepath contains 701 files and copying takes 27 seconds

So, just to execute a simple task, we easily spend quarter to half a minute just copying it over. If there were even more files (let's say a java library including generated javadoc directory, or something similar with lots and lots of small files), we could spend minutes in copying files.

We could work around this partially by ignoring .git directory when not necessary (#697), but I don't think that would solve the problem well. We need to improve the performance.

Please have a look what exactly is taking so long in there and try to improve it.