In brief, the way maven resolves artifacts by searching across all the repos given in the parent pom seems like a very expensive operation. For example, if a product (an assembly of various projects) uses 5-6 repos, maven walks through each repository until it finds the needed metadata or the artifact itself. This appears to be very expensive (to network resources and the time it spends in resolving an artifact) operation. It is also interesting to note that, even if the repository policy is set to never for SNAPSHOTS, maven checks for updates of that particular artifact snapshot. For the very first time while resolving the artifact this approach make sense. But, not every time we resolve artifacts whose corresponding repos are already have update policy set to never. Something fishy going on in the maven-artifact-manager /src/main/java/org/apache/maven/artifact/repository/metadata/DefaultRepositoryMetadataManager.java