Hi! Around this -S reworking, I looked into "-R foo" code, and I noticed that we search for foo group, THEN literal... This forces pacman to read all desc files. Wow. pacman -R group is not a common task... You may say, that I'm cheating, because we will need to check dependencies which loads the localdb. But this task requires depends files only. I temporarily disabled this group removal stuff (pacman.static.new) Let's test (in both case zip is installed): # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && time pacman.static.new -R zip real 0m7.697s user 0m0.056s sys 0m0.091s # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && time pacman.static.old -R zip real 0m11.822s user 0m0.075s sys 0m0.126s Check what would happen, if -R wouldn't deal with groups at all (my preferred -Rg group way; xyz is not installed): # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && time pacman.static.new -R xyz real 0m1.130s user 0m0.009s sys 0m0.011s # echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && time pacman.static.old -R xyz real 0m7.275s user 0m0.051s sys 0m0.081s