Superior Compression with 64-bit Engine

Superior 64-bit Compression with Parallel Build Engine

While available bandwidth and hard drive space are constantly on the rise, so are our requirements - the software we author keeps growing larger and larger. This is even more true when we take into consideration the size of runtime components that our software often depends on - from .NET in managed apps to SQL Server in database applications, each runtime component increases program size, and this invariably reflects in the product downloadable. In the meanwhile CPUs keep adding more cores - now even segmenting what used to be uniform parts into power-guzzling high performance and power-saving efficiency variants - while GHz speeds have been stuck for decades, making it nearly impossible to automatically accelerate demanding tasks like compression, even when using the latest generation components.

InstallAware works very hard to create the smallest possible packages for your setups:

Any compressed files going into your setup are first decompressed using the InstallAware Decompressor. This includes any merge modules, runtime files, and so on. This decompression step is required because pre-compressed data, no matter how badly it was originally compressed, can never be recompressed with a superior algorithm.
The files that comprise your setup itself are processed without any compression until the final step of building your package. InstallAware builds your setup files, adds its own runtime, and prepares the final setup package.
All your application runtimes, merge modules, your application itself, and the InstallAware runtime are then compressed in a single pass using a special algorithm that is optimized for compressing program files. You now have a tightly compressed setup package, with no artificial compression limitations.

InstallAware's unique compressor provides the best rates in the compression industry, outperforming all traditional archive management and setup creation programs:

InstallAware provides a ground-breaking data crunching algorithm to make sure setups are as small as possible.
The advanced LZMA encoder used in InstallAware uses technologically superior methods of eliminating redundancies across multiple files.
InstallAware is even equipped with BCJ2 filters that pre-process your executables and increase their compressibility.
InstallAware's brand-new 64-bit compression engine provides the highest compression rates in the entire industry, compressing files smaller than even Microsoft manages to achieve with their own native distributions.

InstallAware's build engine has been parallelized to leverage multi-core modern CPUs, where frequencies don't scale anymore but core counts are in the 30s already for consumer hardware:

InstallAware automatically spawns as many compression tasks as possible to utilize all your available logical CPU cores without causing contention, thus absolutely minimizing your package build times - even as GHz speeds remain the same but more cores, which ordinarily wouldn't help speed up compression, become available.
The default algorithm divides your number of available logical CPU cores by the number of cores that are utilized by your chosen compression algorithm to determine the number of simultaneous compression tasks to spawn as part of a build process.
InstallAware may also be instructed manually to explicitly spawn a specific number of compression tasks instead, thus supporting multiple simultaneous package build scenarios.
InstallAware's brand-new parallel build engine may also accept custom CPU affinity masks, thus helping you schedule jobs on higher-performing cores instead of power-saving efficiency cores (where often the power savings realized are a net loss in view of the extended processing times induced due to the loss of performance).

Below is a simple chart that compares the size of several runtime components with and without InstallAware compression. Various legacy runtimes are included to illustrate how dramatic your space savings may be over already compressed package sizes. Note that this chart doesn't even take into account InstallAware's new 64-bit compression engine - expect to save an additional 30% on top of the already enhanced compression savings below, if you are able to use new 64-bit compression. The numbers below are for InstallAware's strongest available compression while remaining compatible with extraction on 32-bit operating systems:

Redistributable	Regular	InstallAware	Size Gains
Microsoft SQL Server 2022	266 MB	235 MB	12%
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.8.1	74.0 MB	73.1 MB	2%
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7.2	80 MB	71.8 MB	10%
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6.2	59.1 MB	54 MB	9%
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2	66.8 MB	55.6 MB	17%
Microsoft SQL Server 2019	249 MB	223 MB	11%
Microsoft SQL Server 2017	276 MB	246 MB	11%
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 with SP 1	411 MB	255 MB	38%
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP2 x86	274 MB	206 MB	25%
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP2 x64	311 MB	223 MB	28%
Windows Installer 2.0	3,446 KB	1,770 KB	49%
Internet Explorer 6	79,849 KB	47,110 KB	41%
Microsoft .NET 1.1	23,697 KB	12,338 KB	48%
Microsoft .NET 1.1 with Service Pack 1	34,150 KB	11,403 KB	67%
Microsoft JSharp 1.1	6,764 KB	2,596 KB	61%
Microsoft .NET 2.0	22,959 KB	17,272 KB	25%
Microsoft .NET 3.5 (including .NET 2.0 SP1 and .NET 3.0 SP1)	201,848 KB	131,438 KB	35%
Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005	54,791 KB	33,036 KB	40%