NSIS plugins and LZMA solid

Summary: If you use NSIS plugins along with LZMA solid compression, make sure you reference the plugins first.

The NSIS Windows Installer supports plugins, which are dlls added to the installer which are called at install time. It also supports LZMA solid compression, which means that all files are compressed as a single continuous run for better compression. These two features can interact poorly. As an example:

SetCompressor /SOLID lzma
Page instfiles "" createInstFiles
Section dummy
    SetOutPath "$INSTDIR"
    File "*.exe"
SectionEnd
Function createInstFiles
    w7tbp::Start
FunctionEnd

This installer is LZMA solid compressed and installs all .exe files into the installation directory. It also uses the Taskbar progress plugin to provide progress information in the taskbar.

Unfortunately, if the .exe files are large (say 1Gb) the installer will visibly freeze for around 40 seconds when you start to install. When the createInstFiles function is run, it first extracts the 3Kb file w7tbp.dll and loads it. NSIS adds files to the archive in the order they are discovered, meaning that since w7tbp.dll is first mentioned at the end of the file it is placed at the end of the archive. Solid compression requires decompressing everything before a file to extract it, and thus accessing the last file requires a lot of disk access and CPU time.

The workaround is to move all addin calls before all sections, so they go at the front of the archive, and can be extracted quickly. However, sections define names which are only accessible later on in the file, so not all functions can be moved before sections. Therefore, as a general technique, you can write a dummy function that is never called but which references each plugin, and put that function before any sections.

My NSIS wrapper library automatically uses the workaround.