Reducing repository size in Mercurial

Question

As my team works on a given project with the source in a Mercurial repository, the repository is obviously growing in size. As such, cloning a repository over the network become

Answer 1

Sometimes problems like this can be caused if you have large binary files in your repository. Any updates to them tend to cause large diffs and make the size to go up more drastically than normal.

If this applies to you, it may be worth looking at the Large-files extension distributed with Mercurial 2.0. I've not used it personally, and it sounds like it still has some rouge edges, but if includes a command lfconvert which will convert the repo for you. You could then try it to see if it clones any quicker.