Compress Full Package - Yes or No ?

ice_cube210

VIP Member
Hello Listers,

Wanted to check what everyone's opinion was on building full packages with the compression option ON. It has been a while since this topic was discussed here so I thought I would start a new thread.

Do you still do it and if you do, why do you do it ?

My personal opinion is that in today's technology landscape , where networks are much much faster and most FAT clients are virtual and in the same LAN as the Deployment Server , I don't see the need for compressing full packages in order to make my client installation marginally faster.

Using compression also does the following

- Makes Client Full build take longer
- Takes more space on the deployment server (since it is storing both the compressed and uncompressed directories)
- Requires you to periodically re-compress the parent full package so that it is up to date with the update packages that have been built since the original build.


What are your thoughts ?

Cheers
 
I don't use compression when building packages. All things considered it just feels like a net loss.
 
For a while now, specifications are shared in the latest versions - so the web server never cares. Nor does the enterprise server.

So you don't need to compress "everything". You certainly never need to re-compress.

For development workstations - if you use the naming convention I've advocated for 15 years for your package name, then you can run a script to install all the update packages in order if necessary. But thats still old-skool...!
 
Thanks for the inputs Jon.

As far as re-compressing parent full package , I should have clarified that I was specifically talking about the client package with respect to FAT clients getting all the updates when doing a new install.
 
We haven't used compression at least since we went live with E1 9.0 back in 2010, and I don't miss it at all.
That being said, we have a very small number of fat client installs, and they're all on our LAN, so it really wouldn't gain us much. In fact, I think it would just add extra time and steps that we don't need.

My 2 cents!
 
Thank you all for your valuable inputs.

I think it's safe to say that the general consensus is that Package Compression is not really needed any more unless you have a network architecture that warrants it.
 
Plus, I have noticed that update package takes longer to build if the parent package is compressed.
 
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