Slow Managed Custom Action Loading

[claybrooks]

I'm seeing times upwards of 30 seconds to load a managed custom action. To keep it simple, my CA prints a timestamp as soon as it's executed and then returns Failure.

I've reproduced this on wix v4, v5, and v6.

I have logs from another installer I used to maintain and verified the managed CA execution time was only a couple seconds, so I know it's possible for loading times to be fast.

Any ideas on what to look out for that may cause this long delay in loading? I was thinking it may be environmental, like AV, but I would have expected the same issue on other installers I've maintained.

Here are the logs from the msi that is slow to load a managed CA:

MSI (c) (0C:1C) [11:32:04:259]: Doing action: CA.TestFail
MSI (c) (0C:1C) [11:32:04:259]: Note: 1: 2205 2: 3: ActionText
Action 11:32:04: CA.TestFail.
Action start 11:32:04: CA.TestFail.
MSI (c) (0C:84) [11:32:04:263]: Invoking remote custom action. DLL: C:\Users...\AppData\Local\Temp\MSI1806.tmp, Entrypoint: TestFail
MSI (c) (0C:80) [11:32:04:264]: Cloaking enabled.
MSI (c) (0C:80) [11:32:04:264]: Attempting to enable all disabled privileges before calling Install on Server
MSI (c) (0C:80) [11:32:04:264]: Connected to service for CA interface.
SFXCA: Extracting custom action to temporary directory: C:\Users...\AppData\Local\Temp\MSI1806.tmp-
SFXCA: Binding to CLR version v4.0.30319
Calling custom action Pi.CustomActions!PostgresDialogActions.TestFail
11:32:45: CA Invoked!
CustomAction CA.TestFail returned actual error code 1603 (note this may not be 100% accurate if translation happened inside sandbox)
Action ended 11:32:45: CA.TestFail. Return value 3.

[robmen]

Probably need to put a debugger on it. Or maybe you have a gazillion files included with the custom action and it's taking a long time to extract them all?

[claybrooks]

Now that I've dealt with it for a month or so, I think it's safe to say it's an environmental issue on pc. Sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's slow. Running our installers on our production images is always quick.

I think it's my companies AV. My guess is it doesn't like the CA is being extracted and run out of temp folders. I would say normally the first run after long period of not running is fairly slow, but then successive runs is quick. However that is not always the case.

I can try attaching a debugger and see what I see. I tried to debug from the outside with procmon. The slowdown happened when cabinet.dll got involved, but couldn't really tell what was going on.