Making Archlinux’s pacman go faster

After a while pacman-operations on my computer started getting really slow. To optimize the database and make pacman go quick again, there’s the aptly named “pacman-optimize” which will try to put all the small files in one physical place on your harddrive. For me on ext3 it made a world of difference.

Also, to remove old downloaded files, use pacman -Scc. This basically removes everything downloaded. If you prefer to keep the tarballs of the current version you have installed, and only remove old ones, use pacman -Sc.