Dennis Forbes on Pragmatic Software Development - The Brutal Inefficiency of MSIEXEC

Friday, July 20 2007

I'm going through the process of upgrading some Infragistics NetAdvantage 2007 v1 components to 2007 v2, one step in the upgrade process being the uninstallation of v1. The uninstaller has now been running for some 65 minutes, saturating both the hard drive and the CPU during the entirety of that time.

What possible explanation is there for this? Remove some registrations, delete some files and directories. Done. Where's the big complexity?

"But it's doing complex things!" a friend of MSIEXEC might retort (this is hardly the first time I've encountered outrageous installer times). Like what? Calculating the next Mersenne Prime?

In the time that it has run it could read and written my entire hard-drive several times over, and from a computational perspective it has now processed trillions of CPU operations. Trillions.

Given the basic metrics, there is simply no rational explanation beyond absolutely mind-boggling inefficiency. Par for the course, unfortunately.

.NET Software Development

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Reader Comments

I do agree with you, that its truly outrageous how long it sometimes takes to install/uninstall using msiexec, but its still worth noting a few of its advantages:

1. msiexec is designed to be atomic, you will always be able to cancel the operation and go back to normal at any point in the uninstall process

2. it tries its best to know about dependencies and to avoid breaking them

3. every operation is controlled and logged in details for ease of central administration

I had my share of disappointments with msiexec when i updated VS 2005 to SP1 and it took 3 hours (!!!) apparently the installer treated each component of visual studio as a seperate installation and performed the same operations about 8-9 times (VB, VC#, VC++, VWD, etc...)

S. Fisher @ 7/23/2007 1:06:01 PM

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