The maven plugin works very slow for me. In my project the webapp folder has nearly 15000 small files (images, jsp, css, etc). When I assemble it with the maven, it first copies
In the configuration section for the war plugin, use warSourceExcludes to exclude unneeded files and directories. In the example below, the directories components and node_modules will be excluded from the exploded war as well as from the final war. In my case this reduced the build time from 3 minutes to 14 seconds.
components/**,
node_modules/**