Why is mercurial hanging during adding file changes?

Anne Epstein — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 21:35:00 GMT

So, I was opening a new project in mercurial that had a bit of a history. I ran the normal:

hg clone ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/mycompany/somerepository

Which has worked pretty fast on the smaller repositories that I've cloned. THIS time, it got to "adding file changes" .... and stopped. The thing appeared totally hung, for at least the 10 minutes that I waited. I cancelled it, and tried again. No luck. So, after some searching, I came upon the debug command, which looks like this:

hg --debug clone ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/Mycompany/Somerepository

The result?

files: 891:4346 chunks (1.50%)
adding lib/AutoMapper/Automapper.dll revisions
files: 892:4346 chunks (1.51%)
adding lib/FluentNHibernate/Antlr3.Runtime.dll revisions
(etc... a LOT... 4346 times, actually)

Turns out that the problem was just that there were a lot of revisions of everything, and it was all just taking a while. Oops, I probably should have waited instead of restarting it, I would have been 10 minutes further along. But at least with the debug switch now, I know what it's doing and where it's up to if it's going to take a long time.

Anne Epstein : hg

Why is mercurial hanging during adding file changes?