What does your patch log show as being the places that more time is used? You
can compare the install log and patch log to see where the differences in
processing are occurring.
Unless you have RemoveFile operations that run at install (as opposed to
remove) then there shouldn't be any RemoveFile happening. Are you using delta
or whole-file patching?
When patching, Windows Installer will copy all files to be patched to a cache,
and if you are using delta patches it will verify the applicability of the
patch to the file being patched, before it actually starts altering the files
themselves. Each of those file operations (including the stream and cabinet
extractions required to support them) are all run serially on a single thread
in the MSI service and depend greatly on both the speed of the disks/filesystem
and the memory pressures on the OS's file cache.
Remember that applying a patch is a "repair" operation so any custom actions
that run in your repairs will affect your patching as well. If you can limit
which features are patched, and you use feature installation to filter your
custom actions, you can limit the time spent on unneeded activities. If you
have just one feature, you are reinstalling all 27k files, not just the 15k you
are changing/adding.
Also Windows Installer does slow down once certain limits of number of
components are reached. How many seems to depend somewhat on the platforms
involved and their configurations, I haven't seen hard numbers. By comparison
your major upgrade still has to evaluate the installation would be upgrading,
so I wouldn't be surprised to see it slightly more than double the time
compared to the original clean install (you appear to have almost doubled your
install size with this patch).
> Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2013 09:35:17 -0700
> From: philipp.ew...@asamnet.de
> To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [WiX-users] 400MB Patch taking more than 40 minutes to execute. Is
> that normal ?!
>
> We have the following scenario:
> - base installation with 14k files, 800MB msi file and about 1,4GB after
> installation
> - patch changing about 2k files and adding 13k files, 400MB msp file
> - base installation took about 5-7 minutes to install
> - patch took more than 40 minutes to apply (msiexec running at an average
> CPU load of 80%)
>
> Only about 10MB per minute isn't normal, is it?
> (Using a major upgrade rather than a patch might be faster here, but the
> main goal right now is evaluating WiX's (and Windows installer's) patch
> performance.)
>
> 1. Is Windows Installer running a lot of tests while executing a patch
> rather than just applying the necessary changes?
> 2. Is Windows Installer known to perform badly when the installation has
> more than 20k files?
> 3. Are RemoveFile operations slowing down patch execution?
> 4. Is WiX patch generation slowed stronger by number of files or size of
> files to compare?
> 5. Does Windows Installer generally have a lousy performance when it comes
> to patching?
> 6. Are there things known to slow down patching ? (apart from very many or
> very large files :P)
>
> Any shared experience would be much appreciated.
>
>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://windows-installer-xml-wix-toolset.687559.n2.nabble.com/400MB-Patch-taking-more-than-40-minutes-to-execute-Is-that-normal-tp7587782.html
> Sent from the wix-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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