Composer hanging while updating dependencies

Question

I tried updating a Laravel project I\'m working on today using composer update

But it hung on Updating dependencies (including require-dev)

Answer 1

So it turns out the problem was with php's xdebug extension. After disabling it in my php.ini, composer ran without any problems.

And just to note, the hang-up wasn't actually occurring while reading files from the cache. It was the step right after where composer was trying to resolve dependencies. It just never finished that step and never printed the output. That's why no matter what I did, it always appeared to be stuck reading a file from the cache.