I've now seen a couple of blogs about the improved install speed of the new Delphi version. It may be me, but I really don't get it why people get so enthousiastic about that. Who cares if your installation takes 10, 20 or 60 minutes? It's something that you (should) do only once in a long while and then you're done with that. I much rather see 10% improvement in compile speed than 1000% improvement in installation time.
Am I crazy or what? Let's state it once again and never mention it after this:
installation time of Delphi 2009 has improved!
(now, back to work...)
Bye,
Bart
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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10 comments:
The people installing delphi on a 500mhz laptop probably care. I never found the 2007 install to take that much time but I have a high end computer. Some people were talking about installs taking multiple hours which may be a bit excessive. ;)
But yeah, I agree.
The difference between 10 minutes and close to an our will cost my company 2000 euro in lost productivity, i.e. 50 * 30 * e80.
I think that explains my joy they fixed the broken installation time. (It really was broken)
Also: with often two builds a week, it was pretty annoying for the betatesters.. And got worse everytime. I am glad it got fixed.
@Thaddy: upgrading your projects to a new version, verifying that all the reported bugs have been resolved, utilizing all new features, will set your company back even more than that. However, 10% improvement in compile speed might make that up, depending on the number of times you compile your software of course. I for one compile my software maybe 50 times a day.
For example: when I worked on my laptop, compiling took 2 minutes. I switched to a havy duty server (multiple processors, plenty memory, et cetera) and compile time was reduced to 10 seconds. The hardware was paid for pretty soon :-) The same would apply to improvements in compile speed.
I care.
Installing RAD Studio 2007 and updating it to the latest patch level took my computer about half a day (and it is NOT a slow one..).
If wished it was only about 10 to 50 minutes...
I was merely pointing out avoidable costs. Compile speed is a different, totally unrelated subject ;)
Btw I gave a possible solution to speed up the install: The issue was misinterpretation of MSI backup/restore guidelines. Every individual file entry got its own rollback capability, which was ludicrously overkill for sourcecode and documentation. There were also other issues, but from my experience I guess they took notice..
I care very much. I have to go to an internet cafe for fast internet connections and in the middle of a D2007 update I watched helplessly as the battery died.
Presumably at least some of the people who complained bitterly about it in places like non-tech would care. CodeGear listened.
I care because it's one of many steps in the right direction, and they add up. Another example is better help performance (new version of document explorer).
And for the record, my compile times did improve when CodeGear adopted MSBuild. At least on my big project groups.
I care. It used to knock out half a day at a time, even for upgrades. I hope they've fixed that. And as for .Net, no wonder Bill Gates resigned: it would be an insult to dogs to call it a dog - dogs are naturally lean coherent and efficient. So good riddance to that and the sooner the better they can cleanse all trace of it out of our lives.
It's a human failing... we crave instant gratification.
It's the same motivation that leads some people to get inordinately excited about language changes that will save a few seconds or minutes in framework creation, despite the fact that the result is quite possibly more work in the end to use - or modify - that framework.
I had install times of up to 4 hours with initial versions of Delphi 2007 (not talking about beta versions here!) - and I'm not on a 500MHz laptop ...
I also had a lot of talks with IntraWeb customers who just got sick of running the "Repair and Modify" option and wait for more than an hour sometimes just to deselect IntraWeb, so that the external IntraWeb setup would not conflict with that pre-installed one. (Removing that from an external setup is not really possible due to the nature of MSI ...)
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