cvs up - inodes

This is current/octeon, running 'cvs up -PdA' in /usr/ports.
It's a small machine, running off a usb stick.

I have run out of space in /usr/ports before: not running out of blocks
(gigabytes are still left), but out of inodes; so I recreated /usr/ports
with newfs -i to have more inodes.

During the cvs up, it uses this many inodes:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/sd0k 2.9G 765M 2.0G 28% 255643 159075 62% /usr/ports

but once it finishes, it's

hans@oct:~$ df -hi /usr/ports/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on
/dev/sd0k 2.9G 649M 2.1G 23% 195878 218840 48% /usr/ports

So there's about sixty thousand files that get created during the cvs up
(by cvs, I assume - there's nothing else running that touches /usr/ports)
that eventualy get deleted. Is this normal cvs operation? I remember seeing
e.g. a 'benchmarking' subdir besides 'benchmarks' during the cvs up. Does cvs
(speculating) create everything that ever existed in the repo and only then
prune to the current state?

Jan