Using a Basic MSI project, InstallValidate takes a very long time to run on a busy system (2003 Server with >2000 processes has taken 5 hours and counting) and causes "Installer not responding" prompts to appear, although msiexec carries on running.
Assuming there's no way to tell InstallValidate to ignore certain processes, can I just skip the action altogether? Disk space has been checked during the UI stage (silent installs aren't allowed) and we don't install anything that we don't control ourselves (i.e. no DLLs, no system stuff, no user apps).
Are there any hidden consequences that anyone knows of?
ICE84 indicates that InstallValidate is a required action.
We would not recommend removing or conditioning out a required standard action from the sequence due to the unpredictable behavior that could likely occur. If InstallValidate doesn't run, at the very least the REMOVE property will not be set correctly during uninstall, in use files could cause reboots to function incorrectly or not at all, or receive runtime errors in those cases.
Hmm, that's a bit of a problem. We left the install running overnight but I think it actually completed after around 6 hours. I should confess that most of the 2000 processes belong to our application (which the installation is upgrading). However, the executables involved are part of a feature that isn't being upgraded and we are loathe to mandate that the whole thing has to be stopped just to upgrade a small part of it (the point being that we provide high availability).
I don't suppose there's any way of changing the behaviour of InstallValidate, is there? Making it ignore certain processes might be enough (again, most of our 2000 processes have the same name).
Surely some provision is made for installing on busy servers [I'm just about resisting the urge to make snide comments about Windows' suitability for large corporate environments].
InstallValidate never considers files marked as read only in a read only area as being in use.
I have not tried this so this is only a theory/speculation. Have you tried marking the files used by your application that do not need to be modified as read only? Perhaps that will reduce the time required, if that does work you could update your install to install files as read only.
This is only an idea and I do not have time to test it currently, but it is something I would try if I was encountering this issue….
