Speeding up WIX compiles

I have a WIX 3.0 installer that is building 88 slightly different builds (cross product of 32 and 64-bit, 11 locales, four editions (Beta, Retail, Evaluation, Different Evaluation).

Each build has slightly different contents in addition to localized UI, so I can't just build one configuration with multiple locales.

The resulting MSI is about 120MB. I'm already using the CabCache.

The installer takes about 开发者_如何学Go3-5 minutes per release to build, resulting in a pretty lengthy overall build time.

The install appears to be heavily disk bound during linking (light.exe).

Clearly making the disks faster could help. Does anybody have advice on how to set up a machine that could crank through these installers faster? (or advice on reconfiguring my WIX project to build more efficiently?)

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Get an SSD. Like one of those with internal RAID architecture from e.g. OCZ. SSD is every developer's upgrade of the decade. Plus more RAM if swapping is an issue.

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If you have common parts (that are not localized) you can create a merge module with the common parts and then just add the differencing stuff to each build.

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I am not sure if you have any say or communication with the developers of the application that you are installing, but if you have to create that many MSI's mainly because of languages, have you considered just offering one Language MSI that delivers all the language specific files to a resources directory and then the user can choose which language they would like to use (but only install this if they need something other than the default language). Also it might be worth looking into having the product made in such a way that the user can pick from within which language is best, then having all the languages installed from the start.

As for your question about speeding up the build, that is a tricky one. Using Merge Modules I would rule out right away, as I don't see any actual gain coming out of that. Of course updating the hardware (as you said) will give some results, but again, I am not sure how much of a jump you would be making so it is hard to tell what kind of gain that would give. I think it might be best to go over your WXS with a fine tooth comb and see what is really going on in there. You can sometimes find things that are left over from the developement of the package, or from a previous tool that are really slowing you down. One example would be that my company recently switched to WiX from a more automated setup creation utility (leaving the name out on purpose cause I am listing the problems with it :P ) and it automatically created every folder under Windows that might possibly be needed in the running of a windows application, as well as the common files folder, the current user profile, and many many more. I think I ended up erasing in all over 100 empty directories that this old technology was nice enough to add for me. That is just one example of optimization that was done. It is amazing what can be found when you take the time to REALLY review what is going on under the hood.

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In your wixproj setup file add this just before the end of file in <PropertyGroup> tag

<IncrementalGet>true</IncrementalGet>

This will tell WIX to compile only those files which are changed after the previous build.