Arch Linux's Pacman 6.0 Enters Alpha With Parallel Downloads Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Arch Linux's Pacman 6.0 Enters Alpha With Parallel Downloads Support

Pacman, the excellent package manager on Arch Linux, is working on becoming even more compelling with the in-development Pacman 6.0...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...cman-6.0-Alpha

[microcode]

Package downloads over HTTP/3 would be cool as well. If Arch had that Fedora money maybe they could use zstd diffs.

[ms178]

Finally, in 2020 we get parallel downloads at least on Arch soon. My Gigabit connection would love to get used properly.

[V1tol]

100 Megabit connections like that too.

[kloczek]

dnf is doing parallel downloads more than three years ..

[schmidtbag]

100 Megabit connections like that too.

I have 100Mbit and I reach the limit of my ISP pretty easily.
That being said, I don't really see how this will speed things up for most people. If your internet connection is faster than the server's, downloading multiple files isn't going to speed up anything unless the other downloads are coming from different mirrors. If it downloads from multiple mirrors, then I could see this being very beneficial to anyone with very fast internet.

[geearf]

Finally! I never understood why this took so long.

It'd be nice to have the integrity check done in parallel as well.

[skeevy420]

I have 100Mbit and I reach the limit of my ISP pretty easily.
That being said, I don't really see how this will speed things up for most people. If your internet connection is faster than the server's, downloading multiple files isn't going to speed up anything unless the other downloads are coming from different mirrors. If it downloads from multiple mirrors, then I could see this being very beneficial to anyone with very fast internet.

I have a shitty ISP so it'll help me. They cap individual files around 10-11mb/s, but I can do up to 9 or 10 of them at a time before they're all throttled.

[bug77]

Never had a problem with download speeds (fast connection here), but I'll take it.

Edit: Now if only Android would figure out how to do this. Come to think of it, Win10 doesn't pull updates in parallel either

[fguerraz]

That is SO 1990s and not the solution. This:

• is a very sad attempt at working around the poor design of TCP congestion control
• will put extra load on servers for no good reasons (and they might even stop wanting to offer free bandwidth to the project)
• will have no return on investment as soon as everybody has switched to the new version

Please, time prove me wrong!