GitHub Rate Limiting CocoaPods
The slow fetches and clones (which sometimes time out) that the CocoaPods community is experiencing are caused by automatic rate limiting on our servers, which is done to make sure that extremely high levels of load in one repository cannot impact other GitHub users. The CocoaPods/Specs repository is more or less permanently being rate limited.
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That said, we’re working in the open-source Git project on patches to fix the pathological behavior you’re experiencing (e.g., see here). We think Git’s handling of shallow clones can be improved, but this might take a while. If the Git client needs to be changed, it wouldn’t help until the new client is in the hands of the majority of your users.
The remaining issues, however, are mostly in the hands of the CocoaPods project. I have the feeling that the easiest possible first step would be to address point 2, by changing CocoaPods to use full rather than shallow clones.
