Msi two times larger than msm

Question

I have a .msm of 100MB and when I build my WiX project I get a .msi of 200MB Here some code:

Answer 1

As Chris says, you can try to enable high compression as illustrated here:

<Media Id="1" Cabinet="product.cab" CompressionLevel="high" EmbedCab="yes" />

Read the media element documentation for more information. The "high" compression setting enables LZX instead of mszip format as far as I know.

Here is a post with info on the various compression levels available for the MSI: What is the compression method used by MSI files?

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Some Links:

• What is the compression method used by MSI files?
• http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/xsd/wix/media.html

Answer 2

So when you set compression to high the MSI is 100MB or about the same size as the .MSM? So what's the problem here?

The merge process extracts the files from the MSI and places them into the MSI. If the MSM had a higher compression setting then the MSI you could expect the package to expand in size.