[BUG] npx is too slow for already cached package with specific version requested about cli

[lukekarrys]

npx is hitting the network to fetch the packument and ensure there is not a newer version to run. This is easiest to see with --loglevel=http:

❯ npx --loglevel=http [email protected]
npm http fetch GET 200 https://registry.npmjs.org/gen-typed-validators 146ms (cache revalidated)
gen-typed-validators <files>
...

This makes sense in the case of npx gen-typed-validators@latest but probably not for npx [email protected] where a specific version is requested. On my network this "only" took 146ms, but still a decent cost to pay for something we know didn't change.

I also thought that the network request would be skipped if the cache is new enough (10 minutes?), but I haven't dug into the specifics if that's a bug or not.

I think it's reasonable that npx does not hit the network at least in the case of a specific version being requested. For @latest and bare specs, this is a tradeoff as many users have requested that the cache version not be used.

[milaninfy]

@jedwards1211 I tried multiple times, but not able to reproduce the issue.

[jedwards1211]

@milaninfy one thing you could try is throttling your internet connection

[ljharb]

Anything that could change based on the network - tags and ranges - seem totally reasonable to always make an http call, but fwiw I totally agree that for a specific already-cached version, there's no value in checking.