When testing previous versions of uv, I saw it do that too. But uv uses other tricks to speed things up: it downloads in parallel, it takes advantage of PEP-658 metadata (which doesn't need to download the package) and if that metadata is missing it will next try byte range requests to grab just the metadata of the wheel, and so on. pip was learning some of these tricks in recent releases too.
One problem we have is that support for any repository features beyond PEP-503 (the 'simple' html index) is limited or entirely missing in every repo implementation except warehouse - the software that powers pypi. So if you use artifactory, AWS codeartifact, sonatype nexus, etc, because you are running an internal repository, PEP-658 & PEP-691 support will be missing, and uv runs slower; you may not even have accept-ranges support. (and if you want dependabot, you need to have your repository implement parts of the 'warehouse json api' - https://warehouse.pypa.io/api-reference/json.html - for it to understand your internal packages)
I've been playing with https://github.com/simple-repository/simple-repository-serve... as a proxy to try to fix our internal servers to suck less; it's very small codebase and easy to change. Its internal caching implementation isn't great so I wrapped nginx round it too, using cache agressively and use stale-while-revalidate to reduce round trips, it made our artifactory less painful to use, even with pip.
One problem we have is that support for any repository features beyond PEP-503 (the 'simple' html index) is limited or entirely missing in every repo implementation except warehouse - the software that powers pypi. So if you use artifactory, AWS codeartifact, sonatype nexus, etc, because you are running an internal repository, PEP-658 & PEP-691 support will be missing, and uv runs slower; you may not even have accept-ranges support. (and if you want dependabot, you need to have your repository implement parts of the 'warehouse json api' - https://warehouse.pypa.io/api-reference/json.html - for it to understand your internal packages)
I've been playing with https://github.com/simple-repository/simple-repository-serve... as a proxy to try to fix our internal servers to suck less; it's very small codebase and easy to change. Its internal caching implementation isn't great so I wrapped nginx round it too, using cache agressively and use stale-while-revalidate to reduce round trips, it made our artifactory less painful to use, even with pip.