Try installing the wonderfully named &#x27;eatmydata&#x27; package. Running &#x27;eatmydata [command]&#x27; will execute the supplied command and will prevent it from syncing buffers to disk.<p>apt-get and dpkg call sync() and fsync() a lot to ensure file consistency in the event of power loss. This forces lots of tiny writes to disk. If you throw away the sync calls, the kernel can do a much better job of coalescing the writes into larger, contiguous I&#x2F;O operations.<p>Now, obviously you are sacrificing reliability for speed here. You don&#x27;t want to use &#x27;eatmydata&#x27; with a long-running process as you are basically guaranteeing data loss. But for stuff like installing a new package on a system that is not going to suddenly lose power, it will speed things up surprisingly well.