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I've noticed when installing large pieces of software on Windows (Visual Studio, SQL Server, Office, and things of that nature) the installer tends to hang for large periods of time at or near 100% CPU use with little disk activity. What is it doing during these periods? Why in the world would an installer have large (taking sometimes a quarter or half an hour to run) sections of code that are CPU-bound?
What he said. While we whine and complain about how programs used to fit on floppy disks, applications keep getting bigger and bigger. To "hide" some of that size (and to make distribution of the internet more feasible), most current packages M$ uses employe rather intensive decompression. Even their office formats going back to 2003 have used some pretty strong compression. – music2myear – 2011-05-23T21:40:09.287
Its rarely decompression, modern CPUs can decompress faster than the disk can read data and write it back (of course depends on the compression algorithm). The wait time for pure decompression is probably <1 min per GB of data. See the answer about MSI packages. – Spectre – 2011-05-24T07:30:10.450
Doesn't
msiexec
also verify each file - i.e. calculate a hash on it? That could also account for CPU time. – LawrenceC – 2012-09-09T12:17:44.290