I occasionally used to start a sync, go get coffee, chat with colleagues, read and answer my morning email, browse the arxiv, and then wait a few more minutes before I could touch the repo. In retrospect, I should have setup a cron job for it all, but it wasn’t always that slow and I liked the coffee routine. We switched to git. Git is just fast. Even cloning huge repos is barely enough time for grabbing a coffee from down the hall.