Speed Up Maven Builds 10× with mvnd: GraalVM‑Powered Daemon Explained

Maven is often compared with Gradle , and its biggest drawback is slower build speed; the Apache Maven team created maven‑mvnd to make Maven faster.

Simple Introduction

mvnd does not rewrite Maven but embeds it as one or more Maven daemon processes that perform the actual build work. A daemon instance can serve multiple consecutive build requests from mvnd clients, and when no idle daemon is available it can spawn additional daemons in parallel.

Using GraalVM Instead of the JVM

mvnd is fast because it runs on GraalVM rather than the traditional JVM, resulting in quicker startup, lower memory usage, and no need to launch a new JVM for each build. Maven plugins are cached across builds, although SNAPSHOT versions are not.

Supporting JIT

The Just‑In‑Time (JIT) compilation feature of GraalVM is applied to Maven build jobs, dramatically reducing compilation time and making optimized code immediately available during repeated builds.

Parallel Builds

While Maven 3’s parallel build feature is still experimental and requires thread‑safe plugins, mvnd enables parallel builds out of the box using multiple CPU cores. You can switch to serial builds with the

-T1

option if needed.

Simple Try

Installation

mvnd supports Linux, macOS, and Windows. Install it via package managers such as SDKMAN, Homebrew, or Chocolatey, or download a binary from the mvnd release repository. For Windows, the Chocolatey command is:

<code>choco install mvndaemon</code>

Configuration

Configuration is straightforward. Ensure the

bin

directory is on

PATH

if you installed manually. If you prefer not to set

JAVA_HOME

globally, add

java.home

to

~/.m2/mvnd.properties

pointing to your JDK installation.

Usage

After installation, verify it with:

<code>mvnd --version</code>

The output shows the mvnd version, the embedded Maven version, Java version, and system details. The command line mirrors Maven’s, so you can replace

mvn

with

mvnd

and use

mvnd --help

for a full option list.

Parallel builds feel extremely fast, and console output has been improved.

With GraalVM acceleration, mvnd may extend Maven’s relevance and keep it competitive with Gradle. The project is worth watching for future developments from the Apache Maven community.

References

Takari (Maven lifecycle optimizer): http://takari.io/book/40-lifecycle.html

maven‑mvnd: https://github.com/apache/maven-mvnd

mvnd release repository: https://github.com/mvndaemon/mvnd/releases

mvnd configuration: https://github.com/mvndaemon/mvnd/blob/master/dist/src/main/distro/conf/mvnd.properties