Slow updating of composer dependencies, despite --prefer-dist flag

Question

Why does it take up to two minutes for my composer dependencies to update, even when there have been no changes?

A popular suggestion is to append the --prefer-

Answer 1

I was having this issue while running Symfony2 on a VM that had low memory. I increased the machine's memory and it improved drastically. You may check the memory on your system and see if it can be upgraded.