If you’re using Capistrano to deploy your Rails projects it’s common knowledge to use a cached copy to prevent downloading your entire project from git or svn with every deploy.
What I didn’t know was that by default Capistrano copies over the .git directory when deploying. This was causing a 90 second delay in our deploys. Outrageous!
Fortunately the fix is simple, just cram this into your deploy.rb file.
set :copy_exclude, [ '.git' ]
Daniel X's Blog 