Performance of Patching

soeinz · Post by **soeinz** » Wed Dec 05, 2007 8:04 pm

Hi,
. Our normal installer is around 400 meg and the patch comes to around 4 meg. The patch installation appears to be running and modifying/copying every file which contributes to poor performance. This combined with the fact that the patch installation requires the original setup file to run is what has led me to believe that what is was doing was patching the reference setup and then just running that. Am I right to expect a patch installation to be significantly faster than a normal installation?

Alex_Ronquillo · Post by **Alex_Ronquillo** » Thu Dec 06, 2007 7:19 pm

Maybe you are doing something wrong in your patch. Also be aware of patch source resolution. For more information, read http://www.installaware.com/installaware_patching.pdf

soeinz · Post by **soeinz** » Thu Dec 06, 2007 7:50 pm

Yeah we have read this documentation and worked through. Maybe I am doing something wrong but I was just wondering if you could tell me if it is normal for a patch to take as long as the normal install or if when done properly I should expect the patch install to be significantly faster?

soeinz · Post by **soeinz** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 3:05 pm

Just to reiterate, we have followed the documentation (white paper, link above) provided to create a patch, the patch is significantly smaller than the original installer in size however there is no improvement in performance (An patch install still takes around 16 minutes when it is only 4 megs, original approx 400 megs). In all other respects the patch install behaves correctly. Can someone please tell me if this is normal?

seamless · Post by **seamless** » Tue May 06, 2008 8:30 am

soeinz wrote:Just to reiterate, we have followed the documentation (white paper, link above) provided to create a patch, the patch is significantly smaller than the original installer in size however there is no improvement in performance (An patch install still takes around 16 minutes when it is only 4 megs, original approx 400 megs). In all other respects the patch install behaves correctly. Can someone please tell me if this is normal?

Can someone with expereince patching please respond to this question? I'd very much like to know as well. Thank you.

seamless · Post by **seamless** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 11:02 am

Patching in IA does something with every file in the install (examines it at least) resulting in very slow performance if you have a lot of files. We patched our 180 MB install with a 9MB patch and it took 25 minutes to apply it.

IA says this is due to the MSI standard and isn't their fault. Maybe, but our users don't care - all they know is our applicaiton takes forever to apply a little patch.

Performance of Patching

Performance of Patching

Patching is very slow