When we published Maven Central and the Tragedy of the Commons, we highlighted a disturbing pattern: just 1% of IP addresses accounted for 83% of Maven Central's total bandwidth, often traced back to some of the world's largest organizations.
We described this as a modern-day tragedy of the commons, where individual or organizational self-interest depletes a shared resource to the detriment of the entire community. To mitigate this, we began implementing per-IP throttling mechanisms designed to slow or limit excessive consumers without breaking builds.
But that was only the beginning.
A new pattern emerges: Organizational flooding at scale
A new pattern emerges: Organizational flooding at scale
Since that initial response, we've continued to analyze usage behavior, and the findings are even more staggering.
We're now observing entire organizations downloading the same components over half a million times per month, not for a few isolated libraries, but for thousands of artifacts. This is not a one-off anomaly; it's systemic overconsumption that replicates across vast internal build systems, CI/CD pipelines, and hybrid cloud deployments.
What makes this situation more challenging is the distribution of this traffic across hundreds or thousands of IPs within a single organization. These distributed requests effectively bypass IP-based throttling while still exerting massive pressure on Maven Central's infrastructure.
It's as if a networked army of build jobs wakes up every night asking the same question: "What are we going to do today?" And of course, the answer is: "The same thing we do every night — download all of Maven Central."
This is an unnecessary pattern
We understand that many organizations are not acting maliciously. These patterns often emerge organically in complex environments — across teams, geographies, clouds. But intent doesn't change the outcome: these download patterns are unsustainable and, more importantly, totally unnecessary.
Maven and Maven Central were designed to be very cache-efficient. Components on Central don't change, so there's no good reason to keep redownloading the same thing hundreds of thousands of times. Repository managers such as Nexus have existed for almost two decades to provide caching and better organizational control over consumption.
New measures: Organization-wide thresholds
To address this pattern, we have begun implementing organization-level thresholds — network-wide usage policies that:
-
Identify download behaviors across multiple IPs, mapping them to a common organizational identity.
-
Trigger throttling or rate adjustments once the collective activity from an organization exceeds sustainable levels.
-
Preserve fairness and ensure that no single organization's architecture unintentionally undermines the shared ecosystem.
This marks a strategic shift from isolated IP enforcement to a more comprehensive approach that accounts for the real-world structure of how enterprises build and deploy software today.
What you should do now
To avoid service degradation or throttling, consider the following best practices.
1. Implement a repository manager
Tools like Sonatype Nexus Repository offer caching proxies that can dramatically reduce load on Maven Central while simultaneously:
-
Improving build performance
-
Lowering ingress/egress costs in cloud environments
-
Providing enhanced visibility into component usage and risk
Most importantly, they allow you to reuse previously downloaded artifacts, instead of redundantly fetching them tens or hundreds of thousands of times per month.
2. Audit your CI/CD and build systems
Examine whether or not build processes are unnecessarily re-resolving dependencies. Are ephemeral builds or containerized environments downloading the same artifacts repeatedly? Are parallel pipelines duplicating traffic?
3. Reach out if you need help
If you believe your organization is being impacted by these new policies — or if you simply want guidance on optimizing your usage — we encourage you to contact us directly at mavencentral@sonatype.com.
A shared responsibility for sustainability
Maven Central is one of the most vital public resources in the Java ecosystem. But its continued availability, reliability, and performance depend on all of us being responsible stewards.
Our goal is not to punish heavy users, but to ensure that every organization contributes to the health and sustainability of the ecosystem we all rely on.
Together, we can make sure that the tragedy of the commons remains a cautionary tale — not our reality.
.jpg?width=150&height=150&name=fox-2016-1-sq%20(1).jpg)
Brian Fox, CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, is a Governing Board Member for the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a Governing Board Member for the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore Cyber and Technology Resilience Experts (CTREX) Panel, a ...
Explore All Posts by Brian Fox
Try Nexus Repository Free Today
Sonatype Nexus Repository is the world’s most trusted artifact repository manager. Experience the difference and download Community Edition for free.