We have just released PACE 4.3 and together with several new features, we made it the fastest tool to build MSI packages. In this blog post, we will provide a detailed overview of our internal tests.

Our packaging environment

Below you can find the detailed information about the packaging environment we used in our speed tests.

Virtual Box 5.1.18 r114002 virtual machine configuration:

• Processor: 2 virtual x64-based CPUs
• RAM: 4 GB
• Hard drive: SATA HDD 50 GB
• Video memory: 128 MB
• Guest OS: Windows 10 Enterprise 64-bit OS (10.0, Build 10586)

Physical machine configuration:

• Processor: i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60GHz
• RAM: 8 GB
• Hard drive: SATA HDD 1 TB
• Video memory: 1 GB
• Host OS: Windows 10 Enterprise 64-bit OS (10.0, Build 10586)

We purposely used a relatively slow machine so that our tests could be closer to different packaging environments. We chose five installers of different sizes to build MSI packages (all trademarks and rights belong to their respective owners): Firefox, MiKTeX, Anaconda, AutoCAD, and Matlab.

Internal speed test results

Before sharing our results, we would like to emphasize that these internal tests were very dependent on our packaging environment, and the results may differ on other machines and with other packages. However, even with certain deviations, the speed of building MSI packages became truly remarkable. Here are the results of our internal tests:

Previously, opening a large MSI in MSI Editor took a substantial amount of time. We have improved the Open MSI feature as well, so now you can open packages significantly faster:

But wait, there is more!

Apart from making PACE Suite the fastest application packaging tool, the 4.3 release introduces several new features as well:

• Export registry from the package to REG file;
• Import .NET assemblies;
• Import COM information from 64-bit files.

We invite you to download PACE Suite 4.3 free trial to test the new features and improved MSI Generator & MSI Editor by yourself: https://goo.gl/T5OssL