InstallAware

I am currently evaluating IA Version 9 and have an issue with build times. My install takes around 2 hours to build. I have about 200 icon files and 200 Crystal Report files that are required by my app. The IA build really slows down when these are included. If I remove the icons and Crystal Reports from the install it takes about 10-15 minutes to build.

Is there some best practice I should be following when including a large number of files from a single source directory?

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
LFP

Definitely. First, in testing, always build uncompressed. If you have to build web setups or compressed setups in testing, always set the compression to "none" so you're not wasting any time. And with web setups, you can skip building previously built web media blocks - sounds like this too would save you a lot of time. Finally, with uncompressed builds, you will get another speed boost if your source files and build output folders are on the same drive.

Michael, thanks for your reply. I have been doing CD builds. I tried moving my source and output file to the same drive, and saw no speed improvement.

The idea of not rebuilding previously built web media blocks would work OK with my icons, but my report files are constantly changing.

Is there anything else I can try to improve performance?

The speed issue is the only thing standing in the way of me finally dumping Installshield. We tend to do a lot of install builds, and I need to get the build times down to something a little more reasonable.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,
LFP

I would try enabling compiler optimizations next. It seems that your bottleneck is not drive data transfer/file copy speeds, but MSI generation overhead.

Michael:

I spent some time moving all my setup source files to a network resource(basically creating a portable install) and my build times have reduced dramatically. Its now taking about 15 minutes.

Thanks for your help.

LFP

I've been having similar problems with IA9. I just updated to 9.0.3 and still see it.

The build will be zooming along adding files (all from the local drive) and all of the sudden it will slow to a crawl. The CPU Usage will drop, and the build will slow down to the point where it's adding a file every 2-3 seconds where before it would process several files per second.

I'm also doing an uncompressed CD Build. Is there some logging in installaware I could send in so you can see what's happening?

Do you have any anti virus software, locked files, or anything like that? Version 9 actually has intelligent logic where it tries to re-access files that are locked at time of first attempt (where stuff like this would previously fail the build, it now doesn't).

Nothings locked. I do have anti virus installed, but not actively running. The files are read only, but what's weird is that it will slow down adding files in the middle of a folder that has 50 of the same type of file with the same security settings, etc.

Even with the AV disabled, it probably still loads its file system filter driver - which is still active in pass-through mode, even if not engaged in scanning for viruses.

I'm afraid I need you to test on a clean system and report if the issue occurs again. InstallAware often gets the blame for faulty file system drivers that are actually lowering performance.

It tried this on a different box with no AV installed with the same result.

Was it a clean machine? Can you reproduce on a clean virtual machine?

Extremely slow build times is hampering myself as well.

I am building a 67 meg MSI and with compression turned off, it is taking anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to build.

When I notch compression up to the first peg, it took 1 hour 15 minutes and at complete compression, it took nearly 6 hours. This can't be right.

I'm running this on VMWare 6.5 with multiple proc support, with 2012 Meg of RAM on Windows XP SP3, NO AV, all local files, and a bridged network support with 2 nics. My primary partition is 40 GB.

My host computer is Vista SP1 64 with RAID5 on optimized SAS 500GB 10,000 RPM Platters with 12 GB of RAM.

Do you have the Windows Search or another indexer running? We were unable to reproduce this internally on a test run of a setup with 10,000 files. No slowdown occurred and the build proceeded swiftly.

How long should I expect a Single File EXE build to take, 4,500 files totaling 67 meg.

I'm thinking I have a bad install and I need to redo it.

Apart from the final compression stage, it should be pretty quick. A few minutes on decent hardware.