On 01/16/2011 08:16 AM, solsTiCe d'Hiver wrote: > You failed to mention than tar file are always compressed so this adds a > layer of failure. tar files are generally used in compression, but they do have other purposes. In this case the tar file is being used for the sole purpose of grouping files. Pacman's bad performance in some cases is because it has to read thousands of tiny text files. Putting those tiny text files in an uncompressed tar greatly improves performance just by reducing the number of random reads.
