Are you nuts?

Not yet, but I will talk about improving the performance of our installers so you can speed it up. For those who won’t be afraid of touching registry settings this is a trivial thing to do, but you better reset it after you are done.

Thing is, our installer is MSI-based meaning that it uses a transactional database to keep track of its actions so in case you decide to cancel the installation process you can in theory backtrack the actions performed up to that point.

This is called "rollback". The trick to improve the performance of an install is to disable the rollback so instead of keeping track of its state for every action you basically say: go ahead, I don’t care about rolling this back. But, if things go wrong in a "remote" case of Windows misbehaving you might have your system in a pretty hosed state. Or not.

So, if you want to try the trick here is the registry setting. Notice that this will affect *all* MSI-based installs, not only ours. So, turned it back as soon as you are done.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer]
"DisableRollback"=dword:00000001

You can also use the same setting under HKCU which will be applied in a per-user basis.

The improvements should occur specially during upgrades and in systems heavily populated. Again, use it at your own risk. Good luck.

Share This | Email this page to a friend

Posted by ascardoso on September 28th, 2007 under Uncategorized | 1 Comment »