This feels like a solution looking for a problem. I have a couple hundred brew packages on my system and I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update. I’m sure the Homebrew folks could mine this for a few ideas of how to further optimize brew, but I don’t think I’ll be adopting it anytime soon. Compatibility is more important than speed in this case.

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swiftcoder 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I’ve never sat there thinking “If this was only 2 seconds faster…” while doing an update

I definitely have thought something along those lines (mostly when I go to install a small tool, and get hit with 20 minutes of auto-updates first).

Pretty sure I also will not be adopting this particular solution, however

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bombcar 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've never thought "only 2 seconds faster" - I've certainly thought "why is this taking half the time it takes Gentoo to recompile an entire server".

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saghm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure if I just have way fewer things installed than most people or I just update more often, but I haven't experienced anything like this for years. I run `brew upgrade` probably around once every (work)day, usually right before doing a git pull or something, and then I'll quickly look at a couple emails or slack messages, and then it's always done by the time I switch back

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joshstrange 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But you can turn that behavior off, IIRC it tells you the environment variable to set if you don’t want it to do that every time it runs.

I agree it’s annoying, but I haven’t turned it off because it’s only annoying because I’m not keeping my computer (brew packages) up-to-date normally (aka, it’s my own fault).

	▲	swiftcoder 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'd be much happier if it were on a background job, than arbitrarily running when I invoke a command
	▲	slackfan 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Terrible default behavior is a great reason to abandon a software package.

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SOLAR_FIELDS 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

FWIW this seems to have improved in recent years. Back in the dark times of non parallelized downloads I would purposefully wait to end of day and fire the thing off before leaving

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rconti 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been a lightweight homebrew user for many, many, many years now. I just use it to download or update a thing I need, once every 3-6mo.

It constantly blows my mind how insanely long it takes just to do a few simple things on the fastest hardware I've ever owned in my life.

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pxc 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you use the Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin, running `brew` against the generated brewfile becomes the slowest part of a `darwin-rebuild switch` by far. In the fast cases, it turns something that could take 1 second into something that takes 10, which is definitely annoying when running that command is part of your process for configuration changes even when you don't update anything. Homebrew no-ops against an unchanging Brewfile are really slow.

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saghm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Brew definitely used to be a lot slower, and I used to find it very tedious. I feel like they've done a reasonably good job in improving that over the years though (with the switch to distributing binaries by default being a huge win in terms of speed). I have to wonder if stuff like this is more due to lingering feelings from before combined with the easy access to vibe coding tools. If LLM coding came a few years earlier, maybe projects like this one would have made more sense to me.

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ziml77 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed here. The speed bottleneck I run into is simply that there's often a lot of packages that need updating, so there's a lot to download. And if anything needs to be compiled from source then the time that takes will dominate (though I think everything I currently run is thankfully pre-built)

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noahbp 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The same criticism has been said of Deno and Pnpm and bun, and yet, despite all these years since their respective releases, node and npm remain slower than all three options.

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fleebee 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, but do they work? Last time I gave bun a chance their runtime had serious issues with frequent crashes. Faster package installation or spin-up time is meaningless if it comes at the cost of stability and compatibility.

	▲	alwillis 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		bun is my go to for npm packages; it’s so much better and faster than npm, it’s not funny. Never had any issues.

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never_inline 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, pnpm solves the storage issue, which is a more pressing reason to use it. (I don't know about deno/bun)

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motorpixel 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I have to deal with even the mention of another package manager in the cross-platform dev ecosystem I am going to snap

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dilap 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Horses for courses, but I've stopped using brew 'cuz it's too slow, so this might bring me back!

Edit: no, it won't...

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drob518 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Agreed on horses for courses. Different people have different tolerances. And yea, all things being equal, faster is better, but they are almost never equal. If you don’t mind me asking, what does “too slow” mean for you in this context? Do you have a particularly complex setup? And what do you use now as an alternative and how has that impacted the update speed?

	▲	dilap 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wish I could remember the details -- I know I got annoyed with things being slow and when I got a new computer decided to go the no-homebrew route. I'm using nix, and it seems fine so far, but I also really don't understand it at all, which is a little concerning. :-)

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mproud 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My brew update/upgrade takes forever

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staticassertion 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've wanted brew to be faster. It would be a nice QoL for me.

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password4321 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]