Why is PHP Composer so slow?

Question

Why is PHP Composer so slow when all I do is init a project with zero dependencies? Here are the commands I run:

composer init

Answer 1

Because Composer is implemented by file_get_contents(). That has no TCP optimizations, no Keep-Alive, no multiplexing, etc.

I created a Composer plugin to download packages in parallel: https://packagist.org/packages/hirak/prestissimo

$ composer global require hirak/prestissimo

Please try it. In my environment, composer install becomes 10 times faster.