Best practice recommendation for large number of small files

[anja_laenge]

Hi,

for one of our applications we have the requirement to deploy a large number of additional files to the programdata folder. These are ~2500 files in 110 folders like .pdf, .png, .docx of about 1GB.

My concern is not the size of the setup or the time needed to build a setup.
I want to reduce the setup execution time the user experiences.

In my understanding each file to be deployed to the target system results in an entry inside the MSI database resulting in various operations during install (extracting setup sources, verifying setup sources, deploying, checking hash etc. pp.), which would be executed 2500 times.

What is the best way in this situation?
- integrate a 7zip archive with the files and unpack during installation? InstallAware can create und uncompress 7Zip archives; how would such a setup handle the uninstall process?
- add the pure folder structure as setup source because it is a safer way?
- something else

We use InstallAware X12 and X14, the setup is deployed as SingleFile build.

What is your recommendation?

kind regards
Anja

[JohnGaver]

That's really not a large enough number of files to cause problems.

I'd expect scaling issues in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, of files.

Are you seeing anything different?

If so, could you please clarify whether you're doing MSI builds - our compiler optimizations ought to help with that.