If there is already a post(WITH solutions!) covering this, please just point me to it. 🙂
I'm looking for ways to reduce the size of one of our installer builds. The zipped installer set of files has slowly worked its way up from ~2MB(in 2006) to ~20MB(now 2010). :eek:
While we are looking at ways OUTSIDE of Installshield to reduce the size, for Installshield however, the biggest increase in size is due to the following three files, data1.cab, data2.cab, and setup.exe.
So the question is: Is there a way to reduce the size of these files?
OK. I've managed to reduce the size of the installer by 4MB by not including the vsredist_x86.exe(Visual Studio Redist) file and making it a web download.
I would still like to reduce the size of the data1.cab and data2.cab files IF that is possible.
I was able to reduce my zipped install size a total of 7.8MB in total. In my situation, the main parts effecting size were:
1) Prerequisite: Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86) 2) Merge Module: MFC7.1 3) Merge Module: Microsoft C Runtime Library 7.1 4) Merge Module: Microsoft C++ Runtime Library 7.1
To reduce the size, I made the 2008 SP1 Redist a web download instead of packaging it up in the installer. For the Merge Modules, I got rid of them, and just include the required DLLs as part of the application file set. Doing these two things reduced the size of my zipped installer from 17.4MB to 9.6MB, a 45% reduction in size.
These steps may not work for your situation, but they did what I needed.
Is this an MSI project, or an InstallScript type project?
If it is MSI, we support a better compression algorithm that standard Microsoft *.cab files also support (LZX). You can use this to shrink the *.cab files a bit more.
Alas, the same setting is not available for InstallScript projects.
Is this an MSI project, or an InstallScript type project?
If it is MSI, we support a better compression algorithm that standard Microsoft *.cab files also support (LZX). You can use this to shrink the *.cab files a bit more.
Alas, the same setting is not available for InstallScript projects.
Unfortunately, there's no such flag in InstallScript projects.
There are third party tools that let you wrap up a self-extractor that utilizes a better compression method, though.
To leverage something like this, you would build the project using CD-Rom folders, with the Script uncompressed, and then hand off the setup to the third party self-extracting tool to be compressed using the better compression method.
As you're using the Web Downloader method, this might not offer too much more of a savings, however.
Thanks for the info Cary. I'll look into this as an option if I need to reduce the zip any further. Right now I've got a 45% reduction in size, which is pretty good. 🙂
Cary R wrote: Hi Chris,
Unfortunately, there's no such flag in InstallScript projects.
There are third party tools that let you wrap up a self-extractor that utilizes a better compression method, though.
To leverage something like this, you would build the project using CD-Rom folders, with the Script uncompressed, and then hand off the setup to the third party self-extracting tool to be compressed using the better compression method.
As you're using the Web Downloader method, this might not offer too much more of a savings, however.
