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

Indeed, xdebug is certainly going to slow things down. Uninstalling xdebug is not ideal though. A good option is to use HHVM and put it on composer duty.

Installing HHVM is pretty painless, and HHVM itself is much more rapid than PHP5. It's a double-win -- YMMV, but I got near-5x speed increase (on the eyeball dyno admittedly) in the composer usage I'd get even if xdebug weren't in the picture.

If you are on OS X, then this link might help (blog article I wrote on the matter):

http://circlical.com/blog/2015/11/11/slow-composer-on-os-x