Disclaimer: Even though Delphi 2009 has just been announced, this is still a beta blog, as we didn’t get the “golden build” yet.

There are a couple of beta bloggers who already mentioned that the installation process’ speed has been dramatically improved with Delphi 2009. I just wanted to confirm that, so that you guys, desperately waiting for the new Delphi version, can really be sure they did their homework :-)

My test environment is a VMWare virtual machine, running on a 2GB, 2GHz Intel Dual Core host. The guest operating system is Windows 2003 (thanks Lars). I had the setup run off VM’s shared folders. In other words I have some overhead by using a virtual machine and by using a network location as source for the setup files.

For beta versions we are not allowed to post benchmark results, so I’ll got to be a bit vague here. It got much, much faster than it was with Delphi 2007, it’s clearly below the 30 minutes barrier for me now.  Considering that the whole file set is at least 1.3 GB in size everything between 10 – 30 minutes is very acceptable in my opinion.

There is still one point I don’t like so much. It’s probably because of the MSI architecture, so I can’t blame CodeGear for that. When you start the setup to repair or modify your existing installation, then it seems to run through the whole installation process again – even if you just remove one single feature that doesn’t have too many dependencies.  It’s faster than the the initial setup process, but still kind of sluggish – if you just wanted to modify something.

View Comments “Delphi 2009 Beta: Installation speed much, much improved!”
  1. Olaf Monien says:

    Hi Lars, thanks for your comment. I should have mentioned, that I'm using Win2003 for the tests.

  2. You say:

    For beta versions we are not allowed to post benchmark results

    AFAIK, according to the license you cannot publish any benchmark,neither non beta products.

    That policy change with embarcadero? I doubt it.

  3. jimmckeeth says:

    That is pretty much boiler plate licensing stuff. I don't remember when Borland dropped the no-nonsense license / book license and switched to this boiler plate annoying license. They must have hired a lawyer who went crazy.

  4. Olaf Monien says:

    Well, the disclaimer for us Beta testers explicitly mentions benchmarks
    - which is understandable. A beta is a beta and speed may vary.

    I remember that the actual Delphi EULA mentions benchmarks as well, but
    in that case we would have to discuss what is a benchmark, and what is
    an observation. For the setup I would pretty much argue that the setup
    run time would be more an observation ;-)

    Regards,
    Olaf Monien
    ——————-
    http://www.monien.net/blog

  5. Olaf Monien says:

    Even for commonly called “free” software there are a lot of licensing
    issues many users may not really be expecting/aware of. I wonder how
    many commercial products are basically illegally using GPL'ed
    libraries/components …

    Gruesse / Regards,
    Olaf Monien
    ——————-
    http://www.monien.net/blog

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