Hi, I have implemented the reading directly from the db tarball for sync databases. See the patchset on by "backend" branch (http://projects.archlinux.org/users/allan/pacman.git/log/?h=backend). Some of the changes are quite big (e.g. 9 files changed, 2184 insertions, 1571 deletions), but that is mainly moving and duplicating code in the process of splitting the handling of local and sync dbs. There is still _a lot_ of clean-up to be done in the code, but it is fully functional. This breaks pactests... lots of pactests... but that is expected as the pactest suite does not understand a tar based sync db. I would like help fixing that as I get lost in the pactest code. Anyway, here is the timing for some operations. First time is with dropped caches, the second running it again with the db cached. pacman -Syy (download time ~15-20sec) old: 1m25.197s, 0m22.445s new: 0m19.391s, 0m22.084s (download speed variation...) pacman -Sl extra old: 0m6.973s, 0m0.193s new: 0m3.974s, 0m0.390s pacman -Ss pacman old: 0m11.521s, 0m0.395s new: 0m4.171s, 0m0.477s pacman -Si pacman old: 0m6.067s, 0m0.101s new: 0m1.929s, 0m0.437s echo "n" | pacman -Su (five packages to update) old: 0m17.823s, 0m0.306s new: 0m10.577s, 0m0.489s So the tar backend gets some quite significant speed gains in the uncached case, and has marginal losses when the db is cached. Note that the entire sync db is read and parsed no matter the (sync) operation. That explains the difference in the cases with the db cached. This could be adjusted to read the package list (pkgname, pkgver-pkgrel) first and read the desc/depends files for the entire db or a single package as needed but that is probably distant future stuff... Allan