V4 Toolkit Filesize

The Toolkit General Discussion
1

Am I doing something wrong when running the New-ADTTemplate?

The size of the v4 toolkit is 42MB in size?!? Compare that to V3 that is only 2MB is a significant increase in size and a dealbreaker for our environment. This is a whopping 2100% increase in size…

If we are ruling out the use of BranchCache and/or other peering technologies, this means that deploying an app with v4 to our 10.000+ clients will generate an overhead of 420 GB in network traffic. V3 in comparison would generate 20 GB in network toolkit traffic…

If this increase in size is a result of the toolkit now being a PS-module, I hope you can produce a v4 of the toolkit without the need of the module to keep the toolkit-size to a minimum.

You are loosing a lot of people in the community with this file-size increase - plain and simple.

2

This is the 2nd post about this.
I haven’t had a chance to get my hands dirty on the new version but:

  • half the 42MB is the Microsoft.Windows.SDK.NET.dll (22MB!!)
  • There are duplicate folders too like \Strings\ and \config\
  • In the v4 template you still get V3 support files

I think they will eventually address this in the docs but if you want to report it as an issue, you can do it here: Issues · PSAppDeployToolkit/PSAppDeployToolkit · GitHub

3

I am not really concerned when deploying via Intune as the IMEICache auto empties its self once done however, each deployment with a 43mb addition to each deployment will incur extra storage costs. This needs to be considered.

SCCM (MECM) would be a nightmare if you have 600+ applications (like us).

I think this new version needs to bake a little while longer before using in production.

4

This sounds like it needs a technology solution…
How about implementing Connected Cache, see:

It’s in Preview, and we are piloting it in our Dev environment, but so far it seems to be making a massive improvement for our AutoPilot device builds, 100% of content returned from Cache

5

Please see this post for more information regarding the file size: What's going on with v4?! - #6 by mjr4077au

6

With the the removal of the .NET 8.0 files from the new compiled output, and removal of unnecessary other files from the toolkit, as for example language strings - the size of the toolkit uncompressed is now down to 11,0 MB - 38 files and 22 folders.

image
image698×252 17.7 KB

And this compressed in the .intunewin format is “only” 6,2MB.

This is a great improvement!

Ping @mjr4077au :clap: :clap:

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7

I’m glad you’re happier with the size! I don’t recommend stripping anything like extra strings.psd1 files since their size is negligible, but I suppose there’s nothing stopping you.

8

What files did you remove out of interest?

9

Hello

First of all, thank you for version 4.

Personally, we don’t need a UI for deployments via MECM in over 98% of cases.

Couldn’t you provide a general template “PSAppDeployToolkit_Template_v4_withoutUI.zip”?

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10

I doubt they can. GUIs are intimately intertwined in PSADT.
Regardless, PSADT v4 after v4.0.3 will be smaller.

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11

It wouldn’t be impossible to do a classic-only release, whereby the fluent DLLs are excluded to lessen the load; but it really does take the mickey out of the v4 release and one of its stand-out features.

Please don’t take this post as a “maybe” or a “we’re considering it”; we’d need to see considerable demand before considering it further.

12

@2mmy, just letting you know that 4.0.4 has been released and is available here: Releases · PSAppDeployToolkit/PSAppDeployToolkit · GitHub. This release has a smaller footprint compared to the previous 4.x releases.

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