At my place of work we've started to introduce proper SVN hooks, "proper" meaning "doing a lot of policy checking". Currently, our policy consists of Perl::Critic with Perl::Tidy checking enabled. However, especially the latter one takes a lot of time on commits with several to many files touched and SVN wouldn't return until the post-commit hook is done.
Is there any way I can save some time in the post-commit hook without sacrificing policy checks?
If you want the commit to fail if the hook says "no", the commit has to wait for the hook to finish its check.
Besides speeding up the check, I can't see anything you can do. (Except for the old mantra: commit often. Then you won't commit so many files at once.)