In older versions of npm, displaying a progress bar considerably slows
down "npm install" commands: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283
In Ubuntu 16.04 (supported by open edx) the default version of npm is
3.5.2, so it is affected this issue. The progress bar can be deactivated
globally by running "npm set progress=false", but this is a little-known
command.
With this change, all edx-platform developers benefit from the speed
increase. On a production server with excellent bandwidth, we made the
following benchmark:
rm -rf ./node_modules ~/.npm && npm set progress=false && time npm
install
real 3m29.980s
user 2m36.152s
sys 0m20.868s
rm -rf ./node_modules ~/.npm && npm set progress=true && time npm
install
real 7m5.580s
user 6m2.824s
sys 0m20.304s
There is thus a ~57% improvement on a task that is typically quite
time-consuming, with minimal inconvenience for developers.
