Has anyone else noticed that v4 takes much longer to copy the Toolkit files, and/or to cache them using MECM? I understand we went from 16 files in v3 to 231 files in v4, and the size increased from ~2MB to ~20MB, but an app that used to take about 5 minutes to cache with MECM in v3 is taking over 1 hour in v4 for me. I don’t know if it is environmental (in my company) or not. Just wondering what others are seeing.
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When you say "cache", what are you referring to? The publishing to your distribution points?
Hello. Another MECM user here. I've not too paid much attention to MECM/SCCM distribution yet as I've spent ages (- maybe longer than I should!) carefully testing, improving my template and waiting for stable/improved versions of v4.1. But yes... we have all noticed v4 is a much larger kit - only about 20MB, but it's the large quantity of small files that means a copy/transfer process would take longer than it used to (as files download one at a time, not all at once) than a single compressed 20MB file which would be super-quick.
So far, I've looked to remove unnecessary files but ONLY from within the folders in the level above the PSAppDeployToolkit directory. I would rather leave the module folder well alone for fear of breaking anything!
For example, we only keep just the one strings.ps1 as we have no need for other language support. The data-size saving is tiny of course, but it does avoid something like 26 files/folder copy actions.
I have successfully tried and tested the following zip-trick but I'm not sure I really want to proceed with it, hence I'm happy to join in with this thread and have a bit of a chat:
- I zipped up the PSAppDeployToolkit directory and placed this zip (which is less than 9MB) in the SupportFiles folder.
- I deleted the original PSAppDeployToolkit directory.
- I added code to the start of the Initialization section to unzip (expand-archive) the PSAppDeployToolkit.zip to its intended location, before the usual attempts to load the module and everything that follows.
I don't really want to add admin-steps, unless the benefit is really worth it.
So I have a questions about reducing files in the kit... (the PSAppDeployToolkit folder)
Are there files and folders you can safely stip out to reduce the quantity of files and folders, such as when you only need the default English language support. There are other things in there, like the ADMX folder - is this there just for the IT Admins to grab for convenience and import but otherwise it is not needed in within the kit for package-deployment.
I expect you'd rather advise we "leave the module folder as is", but if there any pointers for removing the files/folders county safely, or even a script to automate that task, that would be interesting to know.
Are there any plans from the PSADT Team to make some kind of compressed version in a future major release that would ultimately speed up the transfer process. I appreciate PSADT is a module now and perhaps some people worrying about the time it takes to transfer 231 teeny files is not really a concern i.e. a non-issue.
Kind regards.
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Oh wait.. we don't really use Intune yet but I've worked with it a bit and done a few deployments for other environments already. And of course for Intune, you have to wrap your deployment package into a single Intune compressed file format. And there's your single compressed file so this is not an issue for Intune-managed clients! The "large number of files and folders issue" is really a MECM observation/mild annoyance since we're were so used to v3 being so small/fast in comparison.
I'd still be interested in hearing any thoughts/tips/advice for us MECM (and similar) deployers, if applicable, else not to worry.
When I write cache/caching I am referring to MECM copy the files from our Distribution points to the local machine’s ccmcache folder, where the install initiates from.
To confirm, I am doing the "zip and extract" trick, I described above. Works well. Excluding any installers, our PSADT folder is only 9.12MB (12 Files, 7 Folders). PSAppDeployToolkit.zip is only 8.5MB.