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 featu

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-155115917 https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/8826#issuecomment-15511591... 2. https://github.com/npm/npm-registry-couchapp/issues/224 https://github.com/npm/npm-registry-couchapp/issues/224