I was curious why does 'pacman -Q' operations took longer than 'apt' counterparts. It seems that the local pacman databases are just subdirectories with text files (desc, files) and gzipped text (mtree). No wonder why local pacman databases tend to slow down over time and need to be optimized periodically.
For long term pacman development road map, it would be better to use single sql based database for tracking locally installed packages instead of keeping directories of every installed packages. This would provide faster access for local database as sql databases are optimized for fast access.
