wheleph
3rd July 2008 16:22 UTC

Large installer size
Hello, everyone.

After adding some media content my installer's size (.exe) has grown up to 1 Gb. But during installation only 2-3 Mb of RAM are used. I'd like to ask 2 questions:
1. Can there be any issues with such huge .exe-files on some Windows versions?
2. Why the resulting installer consumes so little RAM?

Animaether
3rd July 2008 22:29 UTC

1GB installers are fine... 2GB, even (can't do larger; though personally I'm not a big fan of humongous installers anyway.. use cabs/zips/etc.)

As for the memory use.. it doesn't load all of the files inside the installer into memory; that would be very wasteful. It just loads the code to extract the files + your instructions into memory.

wheleph
4th July 2008 05:00 UTC

Ok. Then
3. Is there any easy way to split NSIS installer into parts (caps/zips/etc.)?

pospec
4th July 2008 07:34 UTC

Of course, you can compress your data into more archives (in other words don't pack your data into NSIS installer). Now use NSIS for extraction from the archives. You have to pack some extraction tool into the installer. Your distribution will contain NSIS .exe + couple of archives.

wheleph
4th July 2008 08:00 UTC

This certainly will solve the problem. But I was wondering if it's possible to add such ability with a "single line" in NSIS script.

pospec
4th July 2008 08:02 UTC

You'll have to write more lines than one.

wheleph
4th July 2008 12:01 UTC

After brief testing I've found that on one computer the installer worked very slowly but still did not consumed much CPU or RAM. That computer has 512 Mb of RAM (against my 1 Gb) and a single-core CPU (against my dual-core). Despite somewhat worst hardware I think that the main cause is some software compability problem.

Since end-users may experience the same problem I decided to split the installer into smaller parts. Most of the files are now packed in .zip archive.