I have done some printf profiling and found that supermin's calls to
dpkg for individual packages are quite expensive. Here are some
patches that gather all information on demand where possible.
On my Debian/unstable-based workstation at home, preparing a minimal
appliance using
$ ./supermin --use-installed --prepare bash -o supermin.d
now takes ~3.5s (previously ~15s).
Turning that appliance into an image using
$ ./supermin --build -f ext2 supermin.d -o appliance.d
now takes ~6s (previously ~14.5s).