# 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
```
![2022-05-09__001.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1652117964763/Md16JIZeP.png align="left")

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

0. `/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
```

0. Find the following line and remove `#` from it's start; `#` means a line is commented
```
# ParallelDownloads = 5
```
It should now look like
```
ParallelDownloads = 5
```
![2022-05-09__002.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1652118241870/7L7bEk0mJ.png align="left")
5 means that pacman should be able to download 5 packages at the same time. You can change that number depending on your preference.

0. 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.