Mercurial is fast, but friction in your workflow will slow it to a crawl. Branch merges that take hours. Pull requests that sit idle. Reviews that die in the backlog. Every small delay compounds into days lost. Reducing friction in Mercurial is not about flashy tools. It’s about making every commit, merge, and sync instant and predictable.
The first step is visibility. If you can’t see bottlenecks, you can’t remove them. Track where time is lost: network fetches, large binary files, poor branch hygiene, and long-lived merges. Each one injects delay. Compress history where possible. Split massive commits into smaller, focused ones. Use revsets to target specific changes without dragging the whole repo along.
The next step is automation. Manual steps are human error waiting to happen. Use hooks to enforce clean commits and tests before changes hit main. Preloading common branches into local storage removes costly fetch times. Continuous integration pipelines should trigger immediately, not in batch queues that add minutes or hours to every change.