My bzr workflow is slow. Is there a better way?

I tried to develop a potential fix for a bug in bzr as an example to get me started with launchpad/bzr and so on.

So I did a:

bzr branch lp:bzr

This took about 34 minutes

Version: (Bazaar (bzr) 1.9)

and resulted in a 109M repository.

I made a few changed to the tree, submitted them, and pushed up to a new branch:
lp:~jspashett/bzr/bug_84659_allow_writes

This took at least 20 minutes. I did not wait for it.

I am surprised that it took this long as bzr should, I presume know that most of the content is already derived from the parent branch.

I see that I can use stacked branches, although this cannot be done without an internet connection.

I have out of curiosity performed clones of mercurial and git trunk repositories for the respecive SCM systems and found the time taken to fetch the branches to be in the region of 5 minutes. Both of which have a larger number of changesets but I realise that this isn't an acurate measure of "information"

What is the proper workflow for this?

Why does bazaar *appear* to be significantly more inefficient?

I know that many have bemoaned bazaar's speed in the past, and I had assumed that some parity with other systems had been achieved, but if I were not on a brodband connection I feel that these activites would be impossible on a slower connection, as is the case on occasion, when mobile.