Parallel installation
Sometimes a need for network I/O parallelism, for performance efficiency, can be avoided.
For example, repeated Alpine Linux-based container image builds can use a cache for /var/cache/apk
across build runs.
However, installing appears to happen sequentially.
Since packages should not overlap on the filesystem, and their dependencies/integrity can be calculated, in principle, parallel installation must be possible.
On the other hand, package installation parallelism may have interactions with a transactional or more specifically atomicity-related architecturally significant requirements.
Edited by Sander Maijers