I'm working with a fairly large contract (~12 KB) on a private test net and deployment times are quite large (not mining the contract, but copying the interface and creating the deployment transaction (especially copying the EVM byte code to the geth console)).
Is there a way to deploy large contracts more quickly in geth?
You can use a lifecycle management framework like embark or truffle.
Both allow you to automate the contract deployment on different stages:
Development stage, Staging stage, Live stage.
On each stage you can have different networks or even the handy testrpc tool:
testrpc is a Node.js based Ethereum client for testing and development. It uses ethereumjs to simulate full client behavior and make developing Ethereum applications much faster. It also includes all popular RPC functions and features (like events) and can be run deterministically to make development a breeze.
Also they integrate with automated testing for unit and integration testing of your contracts.
My Tip: try testrpc in combination with truffle. Development will speed up significantly.
http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/7740/setting-up-a-truffle-project ? :P I don't see how you can deploy new contracts and test them.