After our post on "apt-fast", called Improve 'apt-get install' And 'upgrade' Speed, the script created by Matt Parnell (so all the credits go to him) has got a lot of attention and a new version tweaked by travisn000.

But maybe you don't know what "apt-fast" is. Well, it's a script which uses Axel, a command line application which accelerates HTTP/FTP downloads by using multiple sources for one file, and one can use it instead of "apt-get" on Debian based Linux distributions to get an amazing download speed improvement. Check out the post on the pclinuxos to see how everybody is reporting ~double apt-get speeds with apt-fast. Yes, it's not an actual Internet connection speed improvement, just some tweaks which make packages download faster with Axel.

The new version of the script includes full apt-get syntax replacement, and it might even be a few milliseconds faster as it has a few less calls to grep. It also won't call xargs / axel when nothing needs to be downloaded like the original script did (causing axel errors to print).

To use the latest version of Apt-Fast, firstly install Axel:

sudo apt-get install axel

Then, get the latest version of the apt-fast script from HERE. The latest version was released in mid-December but I wasn't aware of it until now.

After downloading the script, remove the ".sh" extension and place the script in /usr/bin so you can then simply replace "apt-get" with "apt-fast" to install a package, for a system upgrade and so on (don't forget to also make it executable with: chmod +x /usr/bin/apt-fast).


For more info, visit Matt Parnell's post and our original post.