InstallAware

Hello,

We are currently moving from Wise to Installaware. Our project contains about 5000 lines and installs roughly 3500 files. With InstallAware, builds are currently taking about 15 minutes to finish with compression turned off. Our old Wise scripts built in about 3 minutes or less with compression. Is there something else I can do to speed the build process up?

One thing I noticed while watching the build process is that when I use wildcards for file installations rather than individually installing each file, the files are added to the project much quicker. This however makes keeping track of which files we are installing much more difficult and we would like to avoid doing it too frequently.

InstallAware has to generate MSI database entries for each file you specify, and also runtime switching logic for each MSIcode statement in your script. If the statements are MSI statements, such as Install Files, the overhead grows pretty quickly to facilitate the scripting magic on Windows Installer. This is why using wildcards speeds things up significantly for you.

Other than that, we do have the most scalable build engine out there, with our multi core build process. But you would notice those performance gains primarily when using compressed setups; even then it won't be an apples to apples comparison with Wise because the high compression strength we provide does come at cost of processor time.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the info.