I'm testing a variety of physical and virtual systems to find ways to improve performance in the ThinApp build process. Most notably, the portion of the build when the MSI is created is quite slow in comparison to the rest of the process. Alas, pigz is not available for Windows (that I'm aware.) The MSI compression process appears to make use of a single CPU thread. This is unfortunate. I am currently testing out the use of a RAM disk, to see if it will help make the compression process go faster. The RAM disk driver is free and comes from: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/ .
I don't currently have any specialized hardware available to me, like a Fusion-IO card or other caching peripherals. I don't have an SSD. I do have a couple of servers, one physical with 8 HyperThreaded cores and 8GB of RAM, running Windows 2008R2 Standard, and one virtual with 4GB RAM running Windows 2008 32-bit.
Does anyone know of a way to get the MSI compression portion of the ThinApp build process to make use of more than one CPU?
Toby Fruth, Sr. Specialist, The Parsons Corporation
