The FAI.me service has become faster over the past two months.

First, the tool fai-mirror can now download all packages in one go (with all their dependencies) instead of downloading one by one. This helped a lot for the Linux Mint ISO because it uses a long list of packages.

I've also added a local apt cache (using apt-cacher-ng), so the network speed does not matter any more in most cases. This led to the following improvements:

• Linux Mint install ISOs went from around 6-7 min to now only 2min.
• Ubuntu install ISO went from average 3min to around 90 seconds.
• The average time for a Debian Linux install ISO dropped from 2min to 40 seconds.

So far we only had once a problem with apt-cacher-ng, because the underlying partition was full.

Building cloud and live images do not gain that much from the local package cache, because most time is spend in extracting and installing the packages.