Maven Slowness

I sometimes experience problems when using Eclipse and running a Maven command via an Ant task across a slow network connection (i.e. a VPN). Sometimes, it seems to get completely "stuck" and I have to kill it. I've noticed that this usually doesn't happen when running the same Maven task from a DOS prompt. (It's often most noticeable for command that download a lot of files, like "mvn clean install").

I have a theory about this. Maven prints a "rolling" status line:

      1024/2331k downloaded

From the Eclipse console, I see this as a long line of numbers, because the Eclipse console is not cursor-addressable like a normal terminal window.

When the available bandwidth is low, Maven downloads just a few kB at a time. Because of this, it rewrites the status line much more often than when there is lots of bandwidth available. This results in a really long line in the Eclipse console.

I know from experience that the Eclipse console is really, really bad with long lines. It gets slower and slower the longer lines get -- something having to do with the way the console is redrawn or buffered.

My theory is that these long lines are what's causing the problem. I can usually fix the problem by using --batch-mode when invoking Maven, since this mode causes Maven to print just one status line at the end of the download.