just did a fresh install here:
npm install 131.03s user 39.92s system 125% cpu 2:16.11 total
On sunday the registry did take about double the time to respond. But that shouldn’t mean 20 minutes.
And yes the node_modules folder is about that big for me as well.
gulp-imagemin and imagemin make up a lot of that. They also make up a lot of the npm install time because they need to be compiled from source in some cases. I am very torn about removing them because out of all the things we do to increase performance (concat, uglify, minify, etc.) lossless image compression provides the bulk of the performance benefit. You can spend all day reducing javascript dependencies and thinning out your CSS: but reducing just one large jpg by 20% will pretty much have the same impact.