PacmanParallelizer

PP is a minimalistic bash script to parallelize Arch Linux's updates download.
It also support many AUR helper as long as they use "-Syu --noconfirm", but is just one line to change and adapt if you need.

Usage

Simply run pp.sh to run with pacman; if you provide an argument, it will be used as name of the program to use instead of pacman.

EXAMPLE
Using pacman:
pp.sh
Using trizen (will install AUR, but those download are NOT parallelized):
pp.sh trizen

Why

As experiment. This script has been written in one rainy weekend long ago, when I notice I could not fill the bandwith, and after some frustration with my favourite mirror going down and causing a lot of timeout.
Since the download get spread to all the server in mirrorlist, I belive this solution is actually ethical and with minimal overhead.

Some advantages of using multiple mirror, shuffled random every launch, and multiple are used for download:

• if one mirror is down, it will download from the other without timing out each time
• if one mirror is not syncronized, it will download from the other without issue
• if one mirror is slow, it will download from the others
• if by chances all mirror in use are slow, kill and run again so you get a different grouping

But it can defenetly be improved!
PR are very welcome!

TODO

• use only one mirror for very small file, where connection overhead is significat
• exclude a mirror if a download error occur
• find a better number for parallel download