Improving DNF Update Speeds with max_parallel_downloads

When managing a Fedora or RHEL-based system, downloading updates can sometimes be time-consuming, especially when dealing with a slow network connection or multiple large packages or sometimes too many small packages 😀. By default, the DNF package manager downloads 1/3 package at a time, which can slow down the process. However, you can significantly improve download times by tweaking the max_parallel_downloads setting.

What is max_parallel_downloads?

max_parallel_downloads is a configuration option in DNF that controls how many packages are downloaded simultaneously during system updates. By increasing the number of parallel downloads, you can take full advantage of your available network bandwidth and reduce the overall time needed for downloading updates.

Bash script performance issue and remediation

I was looking at writing some output to files. The output did not vary much but the number of lines was huge. It was long time back so I dont remember the context of the requirement but I needed to write few million lines of text. The quickest way to do this was bash so I wrote a simple script that could do this. To my astonishment, I could see the script much more time than expected, so here is how I debugged the issue and fixed it.