I am serving up access to many mercurial repositories using hgweb, providing them as a collection:
[collections]
/home/me = /home/me/projects
This serves them up at localhost/projects
I have around 30 repositories at that location, in a source tree with a fair number of other, non-mercurial-managed projects.
hgweb is really slow to respond; it takes about 30 seconds to provide a listing at http://localhost/, and about 30 seconds to open a project, making it painful to use this for sharing purposes.
How can I tune this to make it faster?
I'm running on OSX, if it makes a difference.
AFAIK, hgweb will scan all subdirectories of the [collections] entry in its configuration file. Since you've got a lot of non-Mercurial directories in there, it has to do a scan of each subdirectory of each of them. In contrast, it can stop scanning at the top level of a directory tree containing a Mercurial repository because it will see the .hg directory there.
If you're using a newer Mercurial (after 1.1, it looks like), try changing the hgweb.config to use a [paths] section instead, and provide explicit entries for each of the Mercurial repositories.