Every time you run npm install, your machine talks to registry.npmjs.org. We tested it from Amsterdam, San Francisco, Montreal and Singapore — 20 times each — to see how fast that actually is around the world.
Independent measurement by LatencyRadar. Not affiliated with npm or GitHub.
The npm registry is fast — genuinely, impressively fast. Every single request came back successfully, and the typical response time was just 22 ms globally. That's quick enough that your npm install delays almost certainly aren't coming from the registry itself. If your installs feel slow, the bottleneck is somewhere else: the size of your dependency tree, your internet connection, or disk speed. The registry is doing its job well.
We made a standard request to the npm registry from four cities, repeated 20 times each. This is the same request your machine makes when it checks the registry during npm install — so these numbers reflect what developers around the world experience every day when installing packages.
Fast everywhere, with San Francisco and Singapore surprisingly close to each other despite being on opposite sides of the planet. Amsterdam was the slowest city but still clocked in at 39 ms typical — well within what anyone would consider instant. This kind of geographic consistency is the hallmark of a well-distributed global service.
San Francisco was fastest at 21 ms typical. Singapore was nearly identical at 22 ms — remarkable given the distance. Montreal came in at 26 ms. Amsterdam was slowest at 39 ms typical, occasionally climbing to 66 ms on a bad request. That 66 ms worst case is still faster than the typical load time of most websites. There's genuinely nothing to complain about here.
DNS lookup was instant in every city — zero milliseconds, consistently. Most of the time is split between connecting to the server and the server sending back the first byte of data. There's almost no download time because this is a lightweight API response, not a full page. The breakdown tells the story of a service that has been carefully engineered to be fast: nothing is wasted anywhere in the chain.
Start with the headline number for each city. Open the technical breakdown only if you want to see where that time is coming from.
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
The typical response time tells you what most requests look like. But in a CI/CD pipeline running hundreds of npm installs a day, even occasional slow requests add up. Amsterdam's worst-case was 66 ms — that's nothing for a human, but in an automated build that runs npm install fifty times a day, consistency matters as much as raw speed. This is why we show both numbers.
We made a standard request to registry.npmjs.org from servers in 4 cities: Amsterdam, San Francisco, Montreal and Singapore. Each city ran 20 requests. We measured how long each step took — DNS lookup, connecting, security handshake, and server response — then calculated typical and worst-case times from the results.
The npm registry is one of the most-used APIs on the internet and it responds in 22 ms globally. Run a free speed test on your own endpoint and see how you compare — no setup, no account required.
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