The current implementation of the mercurial plugin uses a too aggressive locking approach for managing its cache across master and build slaves.

By aggressive I mean that whenever a build starts for a given repository on any given build slave, it will block any subsequent build of any other jobs which share the same repository while it updates the cache in both the master and the slave used for the build, and also creates its working directory. With multiple jobs which share repositories (through different branches, for instance), lock contention ramps up.

This is not necessary, as a different locking mechanism can be used to allow concurrent builds of jobs which share the same repository but run in different slaves. It can be achieved by using different locks for controlling the updates of master and slave nodes caches.

This way, we reduce lock contention and increase cache update performance.

A pull request has been created for this: https://github.com/jenkinsci/mercurial-plugin/pull/21