# Good Neighbors: How to Reduce Maven Central Traffic from Gradle Builds

DevFeed: [Good Neighbors: How to Reduce Maven Central Traffic from Gradle Builds](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/good-neighbors-how-to-reduce-maven-central-traffic-from-gradle-builds-24669.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.gradle.org/maven-central-mirror>)

Author: Louis Jacomet

Published: 2025-08-01T04:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The Gradle Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-gradle-blog.md>)

Topics: [Gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/gradle.md>), [Caching](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/caching.md>), [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [Java](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/java.md>), [Kotlin](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kotlin.md>), [CI/CD](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cicd.md>), [Automation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/automation.md>)

Tags: [automation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/automation.md>), [caching](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/caching.md>), [ci-cd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ci-cd.md>), [gradle](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/gradle.md>), [how-to](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/how-to.md>), [java](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/java.md>), [jvm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/jvm.md>), [maven-central](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/maven-central.md>)

## AI overview

This article explains how organizations can reduce Maven Central traffic from Gradle builds by using an internal caching Maven repository proxy. It discusses the cost, delay, slowdown, and throttling risks of direct access, and describes configuring Gradle's centralized repository declarations to route dependency resolution through the organization's repository. The configuration also affects plugin dependency resolution through the Gradle Plugin Portal.

## Source excerpt

Maven Central is a vital resource for Java, Kotlin, and other JVM communities. It provides the most popular repository for open source libraries, developer tools, documentation, and other artifacts. This service is heavily used not only by developers but also by CI/CD pipelines and automation tools. While it's best practice to use a caching proxy for Maven Central, not everyone does. This results not only in excessive traffic costs and build delays but also exposes your builds and pipelines to more slowdowns and failures due to throttling mechanisms to protect Maven Central. As Brian Fox, Sonatype's CTO, wrote in this blog post in June 2024, "83% of the total bandwidth of Maven Central is being consumed by just 1% of the IP addresses. Further, many of those IPs originate from some of the world's largest companies... we will start to work with our providers to implement throttling mechanisms aimed at the extremely heavy consumers, which are effectively abusing a community resource." As this work progresses, more organizations will face throttling, including those using Gradle, especially if they rely heavily on Maven Central without a caching proxy in place. While Gradle currently does not have a built-in equivalent of Maven's mirrorOf feature to route all dependency resolution through a caching proxy, organizations can deploy a configuration that has the same effect and is compatible with existing Gradle releases. This is possible thanks to Gradle's flexibility and rich programming model. ℹ What about the Gradle Plugin Portal? In this blog post, we showcase configuration changes that also impact the use of the Gradle Plugin Portal for resolving plugin dependencies. This is also a community resource provided for free by Gradle Inc. and, just like Maven Central, it needs to manage its workload and bandwidth usage. Note that the Plugin Portal also uses rate limiting for artifact resolution to cope with the increasing load. Using an internal artifact repository Having a