The effect of MSIFASTINSTALL

In MSI 5 there’s a new property MSIFASTINSTALL that can be set on the command line or in the Property table to speed up large install packages. It’s a combination of flags that will avoid creation of a system restore point, skip some costing tasks, reduce the frequency of progress messages, or any combination of these.

Alex Verboon has run some performance tests to see how much installation time is reduced by setting the MSIFASTINSTALL property. He doesn’t explicitly specify which build of Windows 7 he used for his test, but it probably was the RC build (since the beta version has expired and the RTM is not available yet).

Alex Verboon’s blog article:
Reduce software installation time

Published Tue, Jul 21 2009 11:35 by stefan
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Comments

# re: The effect of MSIFASTINSTALL

Hi Stefan,

I used Windows7 Enterprise 7201 English

Kind Regards

Alex

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 4:37 AM by Alex Verboon

# re: The effect of MSIFASTINSTALL

Remembering back to the 90's and my Gateway Pentium 200 that I had at work, performance was always one of the things that killed me about MSI.  I was still doing IS5/5.1 projects back then and when PVCS Version Mananger (.MSI) needed to be deployed it was so god awefully slow.

I can't believe Microsoft is finally doing something about this.... 10 years later.

I also am suprised they are continuing the ugly practice of bit flags.  With other properties you can actually do things like voicewarmup.  With this I guess you are just going to have to remember '7'?

Crazy...

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 3:17 PM by Christopher Painter