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by STRML 3752 days ago
ied is great, and getting better.

Unfortunately, as detailed in a few npm3 threads, npm3 performance may forever be quite bad, due to a few ill-conceived features in npm's infancy.

Due to shrinkwraps and bundleDependencies, it's impossible for npm to know the full dependency tree until it has untarred every intermediate dependency [1]. In the future, it may be possible for a smarter server to cache this data and serve the full tree as part of the metadata, but that is a ways away.

There are some low-hanging fruit still in npm; for instance, the npm registry still doesn't gzip metadata for some unknown reason. Doing so could save as much as 80% on some larger metadata json, such as npm/npm itself [2].

1. https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/8826#issuecomment-15511591...

2. https://github.com/npm/npm-registry-couchapp/issues/224