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.
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...)
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Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.He is a vice president and lead software architect at an innovative New York City hedge fund back-office services firm.
Dennis has been working on solutions for the financial, telecommunications, and power generation markets for over 15 years.