Whenever I remember to update my arch-linux installation, I like to glance at the download speeds and remember how far we have progressed as humans with respect to internet bandwidth.
Sometimes, however, the speeds aren’t what you’d expect and the update takes much longer than expected. Most of the time, my ISP is to blame but sometimes, the mirrors aren’t optimal for the system upgrade.
To sort this out, you can simply run the handy little command that tests all the (enabled) mirrors in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.pacnew and then writes the top 5 mirrors to the mirrorlist file.
# rankmirrors -n 5 /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.pacnew > /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
There’s alot more info about this on the Arch wiki here.