Why updating of dependencies in composer is so slow?

Question

I am using composer (http://getcomposer.org/) to manage installed bundles in the Symfony2 (symfony v 2.1.3). Version of the composer is de3188c.

Answer 1

Try to specify a version for each dependency in composer.json and use the option --prefer-dist when calling composer. It will download ZIP files from the repositories (if available) instead of the single files.

php composer.phar install --prefer-dist