Boost Your Java Builds: How Mvnd Accelerates Maven with GraalVM

What Is Mvnd

Mvnd (Apache Maven Daemon) is a native executable built with GraalVM that speeds up Maven builds. Its design runs a background daemon to avoid launching a new JVM for each build, significantly improving build speed.

Mvnd not only bundles Maven, so no separate Maven installation is needed, but also compiles to a native executable (no Java installation required), resulting in faster startup and lower memory consumption.

Mvnd Advantages

Fast startup : Because Mvnd is a native executable built with GraalVM, it avoids the overhead of starting a new JVM for each build, dramatically reducing startup time.

Low memory usage : As a native executable, Mvnd uses less memory at launch than a traditional JVM, making it especially effective in resource‑constrained environments.

Parallel processing capability : Mvnd defaults to using multiple CPU cores to build modules in parallel, greatly increasing build speed. The number of cores used is determined by the formula Math.max(Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors() - 1, 1) .

When using Mvnd, users may encounter issues related to Maven plugins. Mvnd caches class loaders for Maven plugin classes to speed up builds, but it does not cache SNAPSHOT versions of plugins. Therefore, careful management of plugin versions is required to ensure a smooth build process.

Performance Improvement Test

The author tested on the pigx (multi‑module Maven) project, with the following environment:

Chip: M3 Pro

Total cores: 11 (5 performance + 6 efficiency)

Memory: 36 GB

mvnd clean install

<code>mvnd clean install

Building pigx  daemon: 28247b49  threads used/hidden/max:   9/0/10  progress:  9/51  17%  time: 00:05

[INFO] Total time: 21.399 s (Wall Clock)
[INFO] Finished at: 2024-06-19T22:11:16+08:00</code>

Note: The log shows that mvnd dynamically calculates a maximum of 10 thread resources for execution; later we also tested mvn with 10 threads.

mvn clean install

<code>mvn clean install

[INFO] Total time: 01:02 min
[INFO] Finished at: 2024-06-19T22:30:06+08:00</code>

Specify 10 Threads

<code>mvn clean install -T 10

[INFO] Total time: 34.137 s (Wall Clock)
[INFO] Finished at: 2024-06-19T22:27:15+08:00
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------</code>

How to Use

Download and unzip : Mvnd Releases

Configure mvnd environment variable

These two steps complete the mvnd installation; by default it includes Maven, so no separate Maven download is needed.