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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 SQL Server Express 2005 |
54,791 KB |
33,036 KB |
40% |
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