<p>I'm using a local artifactory to proxy the request, but the build and test phases are still a bit slow. It's not the actual compile and tests that are slow, it's the "warmup" of the maven2 framework. Any ideas?</p>

I don't know what version of Maven you are using, I assume 2, but I will give what I use for Maven 1.x to speed up and make things build a tiny bit quicker.
These will fork the junit tests into a new process (also helps when you use environment variables in tests etc and gives the tests a little more memory.
```
```
-Dmaven.junit.fork=true
-Dmaven.junit.jvmargs=-Xmx512m
```
```
This forks the compilation which might speed things up for you
```
```
-Dmaven.compile.fork=true
```
```
I hope this can help a little, try it out.
Also refer to
get more speed with your maven2 build
.