GIT Pull & Clone times out

I've recently set up a small turnkeylinux revision control VM (which has about 256MB RAM), and am attempting to clone one of the repositories I pushed up to it. It is very fast to push to (via ssh) but is extremely slow to pull from.

Here's what I get if I leave it till SSH times out:

$ git pull
andrewm@1.2.3.4's password:
remote: Counting objects: 403, done.
Read from remote host 1.2.3.4: The connection was aborted
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: early EOF

I attempted the clone like so:

> mkdir myProj
> cd myProj
> git init
> git remote add origin git+ssh://and开发者_运维问答rewm@1.2.3.4/srv/repos/git/myProj
> git pull

When I issue the pull command it reaches 50% almost instantly, and then halts. It slowly creeps forward a few more percent (one attempt reached 66%) and then eventually dies if left long enough.

This repo is tiny with only a handful of revisions so far. My main repo is much bigger and will also be unusable unless this issue is identified.

Any ideas what could be causing the sudden slowdown?

Update

I opened the firewall and found that the git-daemon protocol also timed out, so it's not related to SSH. Changed the title of the question accordingly.

a/ Check your ssh connection from your new local server
(try a direct ssh to check you can connect to the remote, then a ssh-based operation: sftp or scp)

b/ what a git clone (instead of git init + git remote add + git pull) gives you?

 git clone ssh://user@server:project.git
 git clone ssh://andrewm@1.2.3.4/srv/repos/git/myProj

(and what about using directly the ssh protocol in the git remote address?)

c/ What a second git pull displays? Does it pick up where it left? (like git svn rebase does)