I'm also interested in this; my (largest) Installer installs around 13000 files, most of them are just bytes or some KBytes, and the installation of this 200 MBytes MSI file takes a big 30 till 45 minutes (depending mainly on fragmentation of the target station).
It would be nice if I could cut this installation time in half or better since my customers are complaining about this for a long time now. Regards, Albert van Peppen Senior System Engineer Insad Grafisch b.v. -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: Pally Sandher [mailto:pally.sand...@iesve.com] Verzonden: maandag 22 maart 2010 14:02 Aan: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Onderwerp: Re: [WiX-users] Performance Issues with File table sequencing Were you using Components containing single files as generated by heat.exe? Can you explain how you modified your File Id's to streamline the sequencing? What's the average size of your installer when built & what's the size of the files when installed? I'm interested in cutting down installation times as much as possible. Some people have used uncompressed installations & compressed them in a self-extracting package using 7zip's LZMA algorithm for distribution to cut down file sizes which may also cut down installation time since there's no cab extraction involved. However this does lead to needing more free space on the target machine to first uncompress the installer (and requires extra development to integrate the decompression step before launching your MSI). Palbinder Sandher Software Deployment & IT Administrator T: +44 (0) 141 945 8500 F: +44 (0) 141 945 8501 http://www.iesve.com **Design, Simulate + Innovate with the <Virtual Environment>** Integrated Environmental Solutions Limited. Registered in Scotland No. SC151456 Registered Office - Helix Building, West Of Scotland Science Park, Glasgow G20 0SP Email Disclaimer -----Original Message----- From: jhennessey [mailto:jack.hennes...@onbase.com] Sent: 22 March 2010 12:36 To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [WiX-users] Performance Issues with File table sequencing 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-tp477 7168p4777168.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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
