Things are a bit faster now:
hg perfbdiff --count 3000 --blocks --xdiff .hg/store/data/mercurial/commands.py.i 1 # before ! wall 1.510821 comb 1.500000 user 1.500000 sys 0.000000 (best of 6) # after ! wall 1.025628 comb 1.020000 user 1.020000 sys 0.000000 (best of 8)