While available bandwidth and hard drive
space are constantly on the rise, so are our requirements
- the software we author keeps growing larger and larger.
This is even more true when we take into consideration the
size of runtime components that our software often depends
on - from DirectX in games to MDAC in database applications,
each runtime component increases program size, and this invariably
reflects in the product downloadable.
InstallAware works very
hard to create the smallest possible packages for your setups:
- Any compressed files going into your setup are first
decompressed using the InstallAware Decompressor.
This includes any merge modules, runtime files, and so
on. This decompression step is required because pre-compressed
data, no matter how badly it was originally compressed,
can never be recompressed with a superior algorithm.
- The files that comprise your setup itself are processed
without any compression until the final step of building
your package. InstallAware builds your
setup files, adds its own runtime, and prepares the final
setup package.
- All your application runtimes, merge modules, your application
itself, and the InstallAware runtime
are then compressed in a single pass using a special algorithm
that is optimized for compressing program files. You now
have a tightly compressed setup package, with no artificial
compression limitations.
InstallAware's unique compressor
provides the best rates in the compression industry, outperforming
all traditional archive management and setup creation programs:
- InstallAware provides a ground-breaking data
crunching algorithm to make sure setups are as small as
possible.
- The advanced LZMA encoder used in InstallAware
uses technologically superior methods of eliminating redundancies
across multiple files.
- InstallAware
is even equipped with BCJ2 filters that
pre-process your executables and increase their compressibility.
Below is a simple chart that compares the
size of several runtime components with and without InstallAware
compression:
| redistributable |
regular |
InstallAware |
size gains |
| Windows Installer 2.0 |
3,446 KB |
1,770 KB |
49% |
| Internet Explorer 6 |
79,849 KB |
47,110 KB |
41% |
| Microsoft .NET 1.1 |
23,697 KB |
12,338 KB |
48% |
| Microsoft .NET 1.1 with Service Pack
1 |
34,150 KB |
11,403 KB |
67% |
Microsoft JSharp 1.1 |
6,764 KB |
2,596 KB |
61% |
| Microsoft .NET 2.0 |
22,959 KB |
17,272 KB |
25% |
| Microsoft .NET 3.5 (including .NET 2.0 SP1 and .NET 3.0 SP1) |
201,848 KB |
131,438 KB |
35% |
| Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 |
54,791 KB |
33,036 KB |
40% |
|
|
