Wow! I think it's worth emphasizing that in the given example, the time taken to install all dependencies went from 8m10s to 7.5s. Seems like a huge productivity boon for any teams working with Node.
The root issue is clearly NPM's terrible performance, but it seems to have been exacerbated here by VirtualBox's terrible networking.<p>Given that you're talking about developer environments, wouldn't it have been simpler to just try a different virtualisation tool like Parallels, VMWare or (if you're on Windows) Hyper-V ?