I got the information from Installshield that starting from Installshield 12, they changed the registration model. The installscript engine is not initialised in the beginning anymore(and de-initialezed at the complete end) but the engine is initialised at every custom action entry point(when implementing an installscript custom action).
When you have a very customised installer(like we have) this really slows down the speed and performance of the installer... and Yes... this is a problem for us... :rolleyes:
So I was wondering... if someone could tell me if with the release of Installshield 2010, something happened on the initialisation of the installscript engine...?
We did make some small changes in an attempt to improve the performance of InstallScript custom actions with IS 2010. Basically, if you launch your MSI with a setup.exe, the setup.exe will look for InstallScript custom actions (built by IS 2010) in the MSI package, and will extract all engine support files up front before the MSI is launched (the files are cleaned up after the MSI exits). In our testing, this did cut down the engine initialization time somewhat compared to IS 2009.
It's interesting to see the improvement IS2010 brings to the table. Another workaround is reorganize your design to have a single CA that calls multiple functions conditionally. This will cut the init cost down.
@Josh Thanks for the information. I will do a testrun with the evaluation copy of Installshield 2010 and have a look if it make some difference.
@Christopher Indeed... that could be a solution. But... as we have a huge project and before... Installshield 11 gave no problem we have chosen to have different custom actions to handle the different scenarios we could have in our installer. I still hope they could retrieve the performance of Installshield 11 again(what Installscript CA is concerned...) 😉 About your article... I read this somewhat a year ago(when we ordered Installshield 2008... and I was looking for a solution), and I combined as much custom actions together as possible... but we still have a lot of Custom Actions... I'm curious what Installshield 2010 will give me...
