very odd behaviour from svnlite on RPi2

[John]

Hello list,

On my newly installed RPi2, I'm trying to install the ports tree. I'm
running -CURRENT. I usually install and update ports tree on my
freebsd boxen with the following incantation:

svnlite co https://svn0.eu.FreeBSD.org/ports/head /usr/ports

The problem I'm seeing is variously svnlite bails with the following:

svn: E120108: Error retrieving REPORT: The server unexpectedly closed the connection.

or...

svn: E000054: Error retrieving REPORT: Connection reset by peer

or...

svn: E120106: ra_serf: The server sent a truncated HTTP response body.

I'm having to continually restart this and usually have to cd into /usr/ports 
and run svnlite cleanup before continueing. 

I'm on a 20Mbit connection and can get 2MB/s from the upstream server. 
Is the problem happening because of some issue with svnlite or is it because of
some bottleneck on the pi?

Is thered anything I can do about it?

thanks,
-- 
John