After days of researching why the current installer that I am porting from InstallShield (it's a pure MSI not InstallScript) to WiX installs so much slower I think I have found an answer. It looks like WiX sequences files in the file table by their file id. In comparison it appears that InstallShield uses a much better algorithm. I didn't figure out exactly how they are sorting them but all files in a component are definitely sequenced sequentially (and it looks like directories (sorted alphabetically) are taken into account as well).
When you think about it sequencing by component (and directory) makes a lot of sense since all files in a component are installed to the same directory all files being copied there will be done at the same time. Compare this to how WiX currently does it and you could have a lot of files going to the same place being sequenced all over. It appears this has a major effect: My WiX Installer was taking 18 minutes to do a full install vs 9 minutes for my InstallShield installer. The InstallShield installer was actually installing more files too it had 11899 files compared to 11707 files (about the same number of components in both installers). I ended up modifying the file ids so that my WiX build would be sequenced closer to how my InstallShield build was and my WiX install was down to 8.5 minutes! In the end I just wanted to put this out there to raise awareness of the issue and also to see if I should put in a feature request or something. And if anyone has any ideas on the best way to sequence things for best disk performance please post. -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Performance-Issues-with-File-table-sequencing-tp4777168p4777168.html Sent from the wix-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
