Is there a way to speed up remote-hg?

From: John Szakmeister <john@szakmeister.net>
Date: Apr 20, 2013, 11:07 UTC
Message-ID: <CAEBDL5XO4oU9QL1=kQ_f8_MM9jHAKQojMQr_6VSZsEYNY7PLpA@mail.gmail.com>

I really like the idea of remote-hg, but it appears to be awfully slow on the clone step:

    ...
    progress revision 81499 'master' (81500/81664)
    progress revision 81599 'master' (81600/81664)
    Checking out files: 100% (3744/3744), done.
    git clone hg::https://bitbucket.org/python_mirrors/cpython
4484.61s user 41510.05s system 102% cpu 12:29:45.73 total

That seems like an awfully high price to pay. It there a way to speed this up at all? I realize the Python hg repo has more history than others, but even a smaller project like Sphinx takes a while:

    git clone hg::https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx  56.41s user
90.86s system 98% cpu 2:28.87 total

I was just curious if something more could be done here. I don't go around cloning Python all the time, so it's not a big issue, but it'd be nice if it was more performant.

Thanks!

-John