How to Make Arch Linux Pacman Even Faster

Arch linux’s default package manger, Pacman, is one of the best package manager of the linux ecosystem. Its sturdiness and easy way of manage packages provides the core of Arch Linux and other arch-based distros. Altough being fast by default, and having worlwide mirrors available and, there are a couple of improvements that you can do to make pacman much faster

Improvements

1. Parallel Downloads

   We’ll be editing pacman’s main config file, pacman.conf using vim editor but you can replace it with the editor of your choice

   sudo vim /etc/pacman.conf
   

   • Enabling parallel downloads Under [options] in pacman.conf search for ParallelDownloads (it should under Misc Options) and uncomment it if was and set it to 6 This will enable 6 downloads at a time for your next package updates

   ParallelDownloads = 6
   

   • Bonus: Enable eyacandy

     Since we are editing the pacman conf we can enable some cool features to make it look better under the Misc Options enable/uncomment Color and ILoveCandy options and save. It should look like this

   # Misc options
   
   #UseSyslog
   Color
   ILoveCandy
   #NoProgressBar
   CheckSpace
   #VerbosePkgLists
   ParallelDownloads = 6
   DownloadUser = alpm
   #DisableSandbox
   

2. Mirror List

   Correctly choosing an enable nearest pacman mirrors could greatly speed up your package download speed. You should have choose some nearest mirrors at time of the Arch installation, but there is a cool way to update and re rank your mirrorlist at time of update. Pacman provides a script called rankmirrors to rank a list of mirrors according their speed and create a new pacman mirrorlist.

   Let’s install the pacman-contrib package that provides the rankmirror script and others that we are going to use in the next topic.

   sudo pacman -Syy pacman-contrib
   

   Then let’s make a backup of your current mirrorlist with

   sudo cp /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.backup
   

   We are going to fetch a new mirrorlist from arch site filtering by country codes and pipe the results trough rank mirrors script. The next example will fetch French and English mirrors, replace country codes with your own and nearest countries

   curl -s "https://archlinux.org/mirrorlist/?country=FR&country=GB&protocol=https&use_mirror_status=on" | sed -e 's/^#Server/Server/' -e '/^#/d' | rankmirrors -n 5 -
   

   There are other tools that can also do this, you can always explore the awesome pacman wiki Mirrors

3. Optimize AUR builds

   If you are using some packages from the AUR repo manually or through any other pacman wrapper as yay or paru there are a couple of cool tricks to make the process of building and installing those packages a bit faster

   • Enable parallel compilation:

     Previously we enabled pacman parallel downloads, but do you know that you could also enable parallel package compilation?

     The make build system can set the number of precessors used during the build process via MAKEFLAGS env var Some packages in the AUR overrides this in the PCKGBUILD because of race conditions bugs during the build. If you find any bug realated to the build process after enabling this feature, the recommendetion of the wiki Makepag is to fill out a bug to the package maintanier.

     Let’s edit the /etc/makepkg.conf file, and add this to the MAKEFLAGS var

     MAKEFLAGS="--jobs=$(nproc)"
     

     This will use the nproc command to determine the number of available cpus at the time of building the package

Conclusion:

These are just small changes that could really improve the speed of the pacman package manager without affecting the overall functionality of your arch install.

If you know any other improvement, please leave it in the comments.