Speed up Build-Process of WiX-Installer

Question

For my Wix project I am harvesting 4 directories, via the pre-build-event of visual studio, which will result in about 160mb of data, and about 220 files, but the build proc

Answer 1

Simply put, don't harvest files. Please see my blog article: Dealing with very large number of files

The third downside is that your build will take A LOT longer to perform since it's not only creating your package but that it's also authoring and validating your component definitions.

I maintain an open source project on CodePlex called IsWiX. It contains project templates (scaffolding) and graphical designers to assist you in setting up and maintaining your WiX source. That said, it was designed around merge modules which slows the build down a bit as the .MSM has to be built and then merged into the .MSI. Pure fragments would be faster if you are really concerned about pure speed. That said I have many installers around 160mb and it doesn't take long at all.

And of course don't forget about having a fast build machine. CPU, RAM and SSD disk I/O all contribute to fast generation of MSIs. For my consulting, I use Microsoft Visual Studio Online (VSO). I have a Core i7-2600k Hyper-V server with 32GB of ram and a Samsung 850evo SSD. My build server (VM) runs a TFS proxy server for local SCC caching.

For fun, on the above machine, I took a 220 files from my system32 folder totaling 160MB. It took 30 seconds to build the MSM and 30 seconds to build the MSI for a total of 60 seconds. This is 'fast enough' for me. I would expect an MSI authored using only fragments to take 30 seconds.