Enable Parallel Downloading in Pacman in Arch Linux

What is Parallel Downloading?

Parallel downloading means, downloading more than 1 packages at the same time.

By default Parallel downloading is disabled in Arch Linux, so whenever you download packages using Pacman, it downloads each package one by one.

Prerequisites

• Pacman version 6.0 or higher You can check your pacman version by running

  $ pacman --version
  

  

Enabling Parallel Downloading

Open your terminal and type the following commands, I will explain what each command does step by step:

1. /etc/pacman.conf is Pacman configuration file, open it in your preferred text editor, I will be using nano for the sake of this guide:

   $ sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf
   

2. Find the following line and remove # from it's start; # means a line is commented

   # ParallelDownloads = 5
   

   It should now look like

   ParallelDownloads = 5
   

   5 means that pacman should be able to download 5 packages at the same time. You can change that number depending on your preference.

3. Press CTRL + O to save the file and CTRL + X to exit.

And that's about it.

Now when you use pacman, it will download 5 packages concurrently.