I'm using the same mirror (mir1.archlinuxfr.org) for the 5 repos (testing current extra community unstable), and I found that syncing was much slower after upgrading to pacman 3. I made some measures using time pacman -Sy : pacman 3 ftp : 4,3s http : 0,5s pacman 2 ftp : 2,5s http : 4,5s It looks like pacman 2 with http doesn't work correctly. It seems it's the only case where pacman can't detect the databases didn't change, and download them again. So using http with pacman 3 is by far the fastest solution. What are the downsides using http over ftp? But this slowdown in pacman 3 with ftp is still strange. Any ideas what could have caused it? Also, it's funny what happens when, for example, downloading 2 packages from current :
PWD <<< 257 "/archlinux/0.8/os/i686" CDUP <<< 250 Directory successfully changed. PWD <<< 257 "/archlinux/0.8/os" CDUP <<< 250 Directory successfully changed. PWD <<< 257 "/archlinux/0.8" CDUP <<< 250 Directory successfully changed. PWD <<< 257 "/archlinux" CWD current <<< 250 Directory successfully changed. CWD os <<< 250 Directory successfully changed. CWD i686 <<< 250 Directory successfully changed.
ie, libdownload is already in the correct directory, /archlinux/0.8/os/i686 , but it doesn't know current is a link to 0.8 , so it believes it's in the wrong directory, and goes back to /archlinux and returns in current/os/i686 I'm not sure if it's possible to avoid that though, is it?