How to Enable Parallel Downloads in Pacman , Arch Linux

Arch Linux is one of the most popular Linux distributions & is loved by Linux enthusiasts for its high level of customization, great community support, & availableness of packages. Arch Linux has recently added a new feature to their package manager, pacman, that allows you to download multiple packages at once from a repo. It is not enabled by default (at least as of when this post was written) but you can very easily turn it on.

So, in this short guide, I will show you how to enable parallel downloading when using pacman on Arch Linux.

Open a terminal window and type this command to edit the pacman configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf

Find the line that says ‘ParallelDownloads‘ and Uncomment the line (i.e. remove # ). Now set the value accordingly.

The vaule you set will determine how many files pacman will download simultaneously. I recommend that you set it to 4 or 5.

Press Ctrl+o and then enter to save the file, Ctrl+x to exit, & you are done, it is that simple.

Now try updating/downloading packages via pacman, you will see that multiple packages are getting downloaded at once.

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