Hello, it's my first message on this list. I'd like to make a few contributions to improve Pacman's performance. Pacman is a great package manager which I'm now using for a few years without any problems. It also has a very clear and well-structured code but its disk stress concerns me a bit. Looking at strace, a few syscalls appear superfluous to me. Deleting them made pacman -Syu (right after a disk flush) about 10s faster (70% less syscalls). Here's the patch: http://pastebin.archlinux.fr/406557 I've already talked about it on the forum but they advised me to discuss it here instead. There are also some suggestions for further optimizations: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=101702 What do you think? --Tim