I have an application with more than 20 000 files, the installation and uninstallation are very slow (10 min/ 30 min). Can I install all files in single component which is the root directory?
I had an application with 11,000 files (540MB) total and I was using the MSI-based installer project. Performance was horrific: 12-16 mins for install, 20-30min for uninstall.
It wouldn't be so bad if it would give you some status. There are several minutes at the beginning during initialization and after you start copying files where the UI would just sit there and the hard drive would crunch. The status would not change, so I was tempted to cancel it thinking something was wrong with the installer.
I believe alot of these problems are just because of the MSI-installer project type. So I dropped it and was ready to switch to an alternate product. Then I tried the "InstallScript" project type. I found that it didn't take long at all to get it back up to the same point I had my original MSI based one (I converted it in about 4-6 hours). The good news is, the InstallScript installer is smoking fast. It installs my application in about the same time that it would take to simply unzip the files to a directory.
Having the exact same lag, where nothing appears to happen for several minutes. It looks like the installer is frozen.
In my case the installer is 1.8GB, but only consists of less than 700 files. So it's not just number of files that causes it.
Mine is an MSI too. I have been searching for a way to turn off CRC checking or something like that, but it sounds like that's not the problem. Sounds like the MSI engine is taking a long time to get started.
If anybody finds a MSI fix, please post. Otherwise it sounds like we need to switch to InstallShield. Sigh...
