Major Description
This is a regression from 4.2, just discovered.
It was caused in 2017 by this commit:
https://github.com/apache/karaf/commit/a75fabaf071b8274c7f266affa7ce7cdd87a2a22
https://github.com/apache/karaf/commit/a75fabaf071b8274c7f266affa7ce7cdd87a2a22#diff-29d341aa18575466b113be9168a6e7adR264
Here the new RepositoryCacheImpl is used to create the repository. But despite its name, it does not use something from the cache, but it creates a new Repository.
This now will always "load" the repository, potentially refreshing it over http.
https://github.com/apache/karaf/commit/a75fabaf071b8274c7f266affa7ce7cdd87a2a22#diff-a3bb3d36b86e3a4c291627077972097aR47
previously it only returned a Repository that was unloaded.
Registering many FeaturesListeners wastes a lot of CPU.