Why is "cabal update" so slow and could I do it manually?

Question

When running cabal update, it takes so long time to download 00-index.tar.gz from hackage, howver, when I download it from chrome, it is just a 9M file and the downloading finishes soon.

so, why is cabal update so slow, and could I improve the performance by, for example manually download the files?

as for the version of cabal I am using, it is:

cabal-install version 1.22.6.0 using version 1.22.4.0 of the Cabal library

Answer 1

As a comment points out -- there was a bug in old versions of cabal-install that slowed things down considerably. Furthermore, modern versions try to not use the native HTTP library, but instead use external curl or wget binaries which are very efficient and more full-featured in terms of support for proxies, etc.