I use emacs but tend to just find another way to do things (e.g. grep, & other shell things) when I run into a stumbling block like this; believe it or not, not everyone wants to start debugging their text editor when they run into trouble.
Admittedly I wish I would spend a bit of time in emacs internals sometimes just so I could learn to approach similar issues, but it's just never much of a priority when I'm trying to work on what I'm actually working on. I rarely get distracted by trying to optimize my config, as a result I use almost the vanilla defaults and I'm mostly happy with that. TRAMP is pretty great, I wish it would not make a new connection for every network interaction though. Setting ControlMaster on ssh helps a bit but it's still not as fast/transparent as I'd like. There are far too many "blocking" operations in emacs, as much as I love working in it, there is the non-zero times that it locks up on me and it drives me crazy when that happens.
If it was ever the case that I had to wait 30 seconds to open a file, I'm sure I would abandon emacs instead of trying to debug it. That said I can't imagine working on a 70,000-file repo. That sounds like a terrible idea.
TRAMP doesn't open any network connections at all. Instead it relies on ssh (or ftp if you're really old-school).
Open up your ~/.ssh/config file and set "ControlMaster yes", "ControlPersist yes" and "ControlPath ~/.ssh/cp-%C" and ssh will multiplex all of your ssh sessions across as few unique tcp connections as possible. This will speed up scp and sftp connections as well.
Admittedly I wish I would spend a bit of time in emacs internals sometimes just so I could learn to approach similar issues, but it's just never much of a priority when I'm trying to work on what I'm actually working on. I rarely get distracted by trying to optimize my config, as a result I use almost the vanilla defaults and I'm mostly happy with that. TRAMP is pretty great, I wish it would not make a new connection for every network interaction though. Setting ControlMaster on ssh helps a bit but it's still not as fast/transparent as I'd like. There are far too many "blocking" operations in emacs, as much as I love working in it, there is the non-zero times that it locks up on me and it drives me crazy when that happens.
If it was ever the case that I had to wait 30 seconds to open a file, I'm sure I would abandon emacs instead of trying to debug it. That said I can't imagine working on a 70,000-file repo. That sounds like a terrible idea.