Zypper’s New Parallel Downloads: Speed Up Your openSUSE Tumbleweed Updates

On the 27th of March, 2025, a news release from openSUSE, with an accompanying video, demonstrated the new experimental, parallel, downloads for the Zypper package manager. What makes this exciting is that Zypper, which has been a rock solid package manager, hasn’t been known for being the fastest. I would say that Zypper is perhaps the best ever Linux package manager but the one thing working against it, and that is it is much slower to do updates than something like Arch, Debian or even Fedora since their DNF package manager has matured. This is no longer the case or at least will be no longer the case for everybody using openSUSE Tumbleweed and very likely Leap as well with version 16. I can’t speak for any of the other derivatives as I don’t use them but I’m sure they will get this splendorous update as well.

Existing Publications

The full news article can be read here:

https://news.opensuse.org/2025/03/27/zypper-adds-experimental-parallel-downloads

Which breaks down the historical context, discussion and development. In short, the improvement in performance is gained in reducing the time required to fetch packages and metadata using concurrent connections and simplified media backend.

There are a couple of great videos on this subject, one from Lubos Kocman which is a tutorial on how to use and another Video by Dale of Low Tech Linux doing some speed comparisons.

So why am I writing about this? Welp, because I’m pretty excited and wanted to offer some additional anecdotes on my usage of it. You can see the timing improvements from Dale, so that is not my focus.

Usage

Since you can already see that this is working well for Dale and Lubos with demonstrably greater reductions in time it takes to refresh the repositories, here is how you do it. I have not changed the max concurrent connections but only uncommented out the line concerning max concurrent connections.

/etc/zypp/zypp.conf

Look for:

download.max_concurrent_connections = 5

And remove the # to uncomment out that line.

Save this file (it does require root permissions) and Refresh repositories with new backend:

sudo env ZYPP_CURL2=1 zypper ref

Once that is done, do a distribution Update:

sudo env ZYPP_PCK_PRELOAD=1 zypper dup

Then, marvel at the massively increased speed of this package manager as it blazes through the downloading process of the updates. Just a note, which has been previously covered, this does not affect the installation of the packages, only the downloads.

Speed improvements

There is certainly a significant increase on the download speeds. What i find to be the most significant improvement is the fact that I don’t get the same sort of connection failures where I am asked if I want to abort, retry, ignore or cancel that have been plaguing some of my distribution updates. It’s not been a huge issue and this was not addressed in the article so this may have only been a “me” issue.

Temporary Update Script

I don’t know how long it is going to be before parallel downloads will be permanent and I don’t want to start messing with permanent environment variables so I created a little script I call: zup

Open your favorite text editor, copy and paste this in it.

#!/bin/bash
sudo env ZYPP_CURL2=1 zypper ref
sudo env ZYPP_PCK_PRELOAD=1 zypper dup

I put it in my home “bin” directory

~/bin

Then make it executable. Within the bin directory run this:

chmod +x zup

Then test it out in the terminal by typing:

zup

There are other and perhaps cleaner ways of doing this but for now, this is my temporary solution for when this all becomes finalized by the great folks in the openSUSE community. For now, I am super happy with how this is working.

Final Thoughts

This needs to be the default sooner rather than later. I am so very happy with this change. Updates are not something I do daily, even though I run a rolling distribution, but when I do perform these updates, having them completed at a greater rate is going to be a substantial quality of [Linux] life enhancement. Faster downloads with fewer errors is a win-win!

Thank you to everyone involved in turning this from an idea into a reality, even if it is still experimental, it is a fantastic experiment. Thank you so much!

References

Zypper Adds Experimental Parallel Downloads Article on news.openSUSE.org
openSUSE Tutorial by Lubos Kocman
Testing Zypper Parallel Downloads – Low Tech Linux