Since I was on a 28.8k dialup the last week, I have now felt the pain of people stuck on dialup modems. Something I figured out that helped a great deal was to use SSH compression.
In OpenSSH, -C enables compression. I changed my CVS_RSH environment variables to be 'ssh -C' and it worked wonders for cvs diff and update times. -- http://www.clock.org/~matt
