Improving performance of Wix msi install/uninstall

Question

In Windows 7(i.e. MSI 5.0), there is a property called MSIFASTINSTALL which will improve the performance of your installer. Or else, you can turn off the rollback option by setting property DISABLEROLLBACK. This property is available in earlier version of MSI 5.0 too.

Please share your knowledge to improve the install experience. Also, I cannot find the right way to improve the performance of Uninstall. We use huge set of files/folders (more than 70,000) and components like 35000. It hangs in the file costing process and do not know how to avoid this delay. Sometime it hangs for more than 2 or 3 hours to uninstall in XP or Vista machines

Edit: I did some hack in my install by zipping the folders which has huge file sets and reduced the components size like Christopher said. It improved the performance drastically. yes ofcourse, I lost the MSI installer pattern by doing this concept and it is not recommended approach. However, it is trade off when we want to achieve this and our user really do not want to have file version details when we uninstall/upgrade the patches.

Answer 1

The best option for improving the performance of your app is to reduce the number of files and components. While there may be a couple tweaks you can do to your MSI to improve the performance, the excessive number of files/components is the core issue and will be the gating factor on any performance improvements you make. Why do you need to install 70k files?

Answer 2

I had a similar situation, though the number of files was a bit less, about 25k. Most of those files were icons, which were never changed from one release to another. Only a major release (once per 2 years) might bring some changes to this area. A "quick & dirty" solution was zipping those icons and include this single file into the installation (not a component, just a file side by side with the MSI). During the installation this ZIP was extracted in the background thread, and RemoveFile table was used to delete icons on uninstall. It was faster than installing those 20k icons as separate components, even as components with many files. A good and correct solution was to convince the main application developers to put all those 20k icons into the 20 zip archives. Now these 20 zip files are installed as regular MSI components, and the application knows how to extract an icon on demand and cache it.

I would not recommend you to disable rollback. Though you'll save quite some installation time, you lose a standard guaranteed rollback option.

Uninstall takes more time than install because of rollback feature again. The way I understand it, when you uninstall, the MSI firstly creates a copy of every single file, then uninstalls every single file, and in case of success, drops every single backed up file. Hence, the uninstall time is about three times as much as the install time. I experienced the same problem when I took a default option to have 1 file per component. Though it is recommended, you should make a trade-off if you deal with an outstanding case.

Hope this clears up the things for you a bit.