A new zypper experimental media backend and support for parallel package downloads have been introduced with the release of libzypp version 17.36.4 and zypper version 1.14.87.

These enhancements, according to an email on the factory mailing list, improve the performance of package management by reducing the time required to fetch packages and metadata.

The update provides two main features: an ability to fetch packages using concurrent connections, and a simplified media backend that improves connection reuse and metadata handling. Both features are currently in an experimental phase and must be manually enabled.

Before the feature is officially enabled by default, parallel package downloading can be enabled by setting an environment variable before executing a zypper operation. This allows multiple packages to be downloaded simultaneously, improving overall speed.

To Enable parallel downloads

env ZYPP_PCK_PRELOAD=1 zypper dup 

The number of concurrent downloads can be configured in the zypp.conf file using the following directive:

download.max_concurrent_connections = 5 

The default is 5. However, higher values may yield better performance depending on system resources and network conditions.

The new media backend can be enabled with a separate environment variable. The backend eliminates overhead by avoiding metalink fetching and multi-server file splitting. It is optimized for better connection reuse during metadata fetches.

To enable the new media backend

env ZYPP_CURL2=1 zypper ref 

While these two features are separate, they are most effective when used together. Using metalink= URLs in .repo files can further improve mirror performance. However, baseurl= remains the preferred setting for production systems due to its trusted key behavior.

The following versions are required to use the new features:

• libzypp version 17.36.4 or newer
• zypper version 1.14.87 or newer

These are available in Tumbleweed and Slowroll. Users can test out these new enhancements on Leap or immutable desktop variants Aeon and Kalpa using Distrobox.

Users of openSUSE-repos on Tumblweed gained mediahandler=curl2 as part of the repository urls as well as preset ZYPP_PCK_PRELOAD=1 via /etc/profile.d/opensuse_repos.sh with the latest openSUSE-repos update.

Leap 15 and 16 users can currently get the zypper update with these enhancements from the development repository.

To install the updated packages, users can switch to a root shell with sudo su - and run zypper in <package-name>.

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/zypp:/Head/

The parallel downloads should allow systems on slow or high-latency connections to make better use of available bandwidth. Metadata refreshes become more efficient with the new backend. These improvements also reduce setup time in CI/CD pipelines and automated environments.

The following are some benchmark results listed in the email on the factory mailing list:

Scenario                                           Time --------------------------------------------  -------- Download 100MB / ~250 packages Default (MultiCurl)                               68.7 sec New Backend (ZYPP_CURL2=1)                        29.6 sec Parallel Downloads (ZYPP_PCK_PRELOAD=1)           13.1 sec Download 1.02GB / 407 packages into empty rootfs Default (MultiCurl)                               281.1 sec New Backend (ZYPP_CURL2=1)                        208.5 sec Parallel Downloads (ZYPP_PCK_PRELOAD=1)           119.6 sec 

These results show significant improvements in real-world scenarios with total execution time reduced by more than 50 percent in some cases.

Although still experimental, these options are available now for users who wish to enable and test them.

Users who’d like to provide feedback can respond to the mailing list thread or submit a bug report against libzypp bugzilla component.

The more feedback the sooner the feature can be made official.

Tutorial

Watch our tutorial on the openSUSE YouTube channel showing its use and setup.

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