best practices against long git rebase times?

Hi all,

our workflow is pretty rebase-free for diverse reasons yet.

One obstacle now appearing is that rebases simply take very long - once you might want to do a rebase there are several hundred commits on the remote branch, and our tree isn't small either.

This produces rebase times in the minute range. I suppose this is because rebase tries to see if there are new commits in the destination branch that are identical to one of the local commits, to be able to skip them. (I didn't try to verify this hypothesis.)

What can we do to make this faster?

Andreas