Node Version Manager runs very slow on M1 Macbook Air

Question

I am currently finding that running Node Version Manager on my M1 Macbook (using zsh console), it is running node commands very slowly.

An npm install can take 30+ minutes to complete. However, if I don't use NVM and decide to install the same version of node directly, the commands runs much faster as expected (2 minutes for an npm install).

I have tried using different versions of node with NVM and the commands still run slow. I have also tried to run terminal using Rosetta and they still take forever to run.

Looking around I have seen people complain about NVM starting slowly but mine loads almost instantly, its just commands running that takes a long time.

Is this just an M1 chip issue or have I possibly done something wrong?

user_5062956 · Answer

I had the same problem, installing the node version using the 64-bit X86 architecture fixed the issue.

Here is the instruction(look at section: Macs with M1 chip): https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm#macos-troubleshooting

user_15504577 · Answer

Eventually, I found that changing the version of node helped immensely.

I was using node 12 at the time of the question and since upgrading to node 15 using NVM, I found that it ran much quicker and was actually usable.

Node Version Manager runs very slow on M1 Macbook Air

2 Answers