I sped up dpkg quite a bit with the following commands:

sudo su -
cd /var/lib/dpkg
tar cvzf info.tar.gz info
rm -rf info
tar xvzpf info.tar.gz
rm info.tar.gz

Basically, by archiving up everything in that folder, deleting it, and writing it again, it defragmented that folder. dpkg is now many times faster.

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