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#1 2012-02-12 10:29:16

magesha
Member
Registered: 2011-07-19
Posts: 4

Speeding up pacman - opinions and recommendations appreciated

I just finished installing Arch using Archbang liveUSB, and updating it. Now, I am installing KDE group. I love Arch in that it provides many options and we can pick what we want; I think it reflects the true spirit of linux. smile

But, sometimes it can be a pain to decide which is the best choice.. I wanted to speed up my downloads using pacman. I am on a DSL connection and my speed is not great. I usually get 70-140 kBps on torrents and direct downloads using parallel downloads (using download managers in windows). With pacman after using rankmirrors and reflector, I get 25-30kBps. I was wondering if I can speed it up somehow and found the wiki page Improving Pacman Performance which is great and shows four options: aria2, pacman2aria2
(powerpill-light front end script), airpac and pacget. Now my questions:

1. Which among these is the best for my situation? I feel powerpill-light or pacget would be best as they both allow for parallel downloads (from multiple mirrors?), Is it ok to download from multiple mirrors simultaneously or is such a thing frowned upon? If I use reflector with the latest 6 sorted by speed, I think I should be ok for multiple mirrors; what do you guys think?

2. So I thought I will test it out and see what works best but ran into a confusion/potential problem. If I start a download using one such tool but I interrupt it, and then change the Xfercmd, what happens when I resume the install? I was doing kde-meta group install, and it was in the middle of a big download using aria2c; then I switched to pacget (I figured because they are both backends they may be compatible) but then, pacget started downloading the next file in the list, and the size of the earlier file is subtracted from total download size that shows in the beginning. So, I am not sure if:

a) pacget will continue the big file download,
b) pacget will ignore the half part downloaded by aria and redownload the whole file,
c) pacget will not download that file thinking it was fully downloaded and then pacman will fail at the install stage because the file is missing,

I am ok with a or b (prefer a) but c can be a problem.. If it is going to be c), how can I fix it? Should I delete the .part and .aria2 files from my /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ folder and rerun pacman -S?

UPDATE: Ok, it is c!! (as I suspected hmm) Now, I moved the partially downloaded files to another folder (both the part and the aria2 files) and restarted with pacman -S kde-meta and it starts downloading the file again  but if I interrupt it and start again, it acts like the download was finished and checks packages for integrity and fails the install..

Guess I will have to survive downloading the whole file again and in one shot; but then, if something happens and I lose internet connection in the middle of a big download, this means I lose the entire download and have to remove the part files and let the download happen again and hope for the best. Am I missing something here because the wiki says that the downloads will be resumed but it doesn't.

3. Is there any such tool to speed up downloads from the aur? For eg, I want to install xonotic from aur, and it needs xonotic-data which is 900+ MiB; Is there any other way of getting this than packer or yaourt which can be fast?

Thanks much!

Magesha

Last edited by magesha (2012-02-12 10:53:45)

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#2 2012-02-12 16:50:11

falconindy
Developer
From: New York, USA
Registered: 2009-10-22
Posts: 4,111
Website

Re: Speeding up pacman - opinions and recommendations appreciated

For pacman: find a faster mirror. The internal downloader is more than capable of maxing out your connection. I strongly suggest using this over the XferCommand simply because you think you will get better speed.

For the AUR: none of this data is stored on the AUR itself. We host the tiny little text files that you download in the .tar.gz files. Nothing you can do about this if the upstream project isn't providing a high bandwidth connection.

Last edited by falconindy (2012-02-12 16:50:45)

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#3 2012-02-12 17:01:00

magesha
Member
Registered: 2011-07-19
Posts: 4

Re: Speeding up pacman - opinions and recommendations appreciated

Thanks falconindy. Just one more question for finding the faster mirror. Which is better? rankmirrors or reflector?

In reflector, I use

 reflector -l 6 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist 

so I will get the 6 latest mirrors sorted out by speed. Would you suggest any other option? (like -f 6 sort age)

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#4 2012-02-12 17:19:26

falconindy
Developer
From: New York, USA
Registered: 2009-10-22
Posts: 4,111
Website

Re: Speeding up pacman - opinions and recommendations appreciated

I don't use reflector, I simply use a mirror that's geographically nearby.

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#5 2012-02-13 12:34:24

ratcheer
Member
Registered: 2011-10-09
Posts: 924

Re: Speeding up pacman - opinions and recommendations appreciated

Yesterday, I found out that it is good to re-rank the mirrors, occasionally, as recommended on the "mirrors" wiki page. A few months ago, the server that was fastest for me was at a nearby major university. But, I had been having some hiccups from it lately and a new mirrorlist came in the updates yesterday morning, so I decided to re-rank and see what I got.

I had it rank all mirrors in my country (USA), keeping the fastest 12. Then, I manually inspected each of the 12 against the wiki's mirror status page, keeping the seven that were most up-to-date and keeping them in the same order that the speed ranking had assigned them. I noted that my previously fastest mirror was no longer even in the top 12, and only about 3 of my previous top 6 were in the new top 12.

So, when I tried my new mirrorlist, pacman flew like the wind.

Tim

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