Speeding up APT

As someone knows using multiple connections to download files could be helpful to speed up the upgrading processes (take a look to urpmi).

Apt is definetly a good tool provided by debian, but from this point of view it could be “improved” (see notes below).

Here you can see the way I’ve reduced my download times using only apt, axel and -obviously- bash:

# ( cd /var/cache/apt/archives/ && apt-get -y --print-uris install $package | grep ^' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -i axel -n 25 -a {} )

Notes: downloading files through multiple connections does not represent the best solution because the increasing number of connections leads to an increased load of the server plus other nasty things. A better way could be a wider usage of debdelta. Take a look to YUM presto plugin.