Pacman I/O tweaks for older spinning disks

Arch Linux
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I’ve been thinking about this since @Halano post about pacman’s pros and cons. He’s right, all those open() and close() calls in /var/lib/pacman/local are rough on a spinning disk.

For those on an HDD, you can try the following:

Keep the cache under control. /var/cache/pacman/pkg grows forever by default. Use paccache -rk3 to keep the last three versions and clear the rest. Less clutter, fewer filesystem hits. See: [SOLVED] Question about cleaning the package cache / Newbie Corner / Arch Linux Forums

On ext4, I’m not sure what the default is now, but mount with noatime. Pacman reads a ton of small files and atime updates turn that into extra writes.

Also see tips for general disk I/O reduction here:

Also found these related discussions on eatmydata with pacman and deadline scheduler:

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