smart installer and big size Qt app

[detook]

Good day, community.

My Qt app's size is about 75 Mb (many embedded videos).
Before submitting application to OVI Store I certainly build it with embedded Smart Installer using this manual http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/ov.../qt-content-qa

Results:
1) Installation with all videos (75Mb) with Smart Installer - application Icon cannot be found on the phone after installation. Although the content showed up in Settings -> Application Manager, the icon cannot be found anywhere on the phone.

2) Installation with one video file (5Mb) with Smart Installer - installation successful
3) Installation with all videos (75Mb) without Smart Installer - installation successful

Is this a Smart Installer issue? Please advise.

UPDATE: I'm using Nokia Smart Installer for Symbian release v1.1 (0.46.0)

[danhicksbyron]

We successfully shipped a 10Mb app using Smart Installer.

Of course, one problem you'll have is that most phones don't even have the room for a 75M app. The Smart Installer is going to need to extract the app sis file and will almost certainly do so onto the C: drive. If there isn't 75M on the C: drive the install will fail, even if it's targeted to a different drive.

[detook]

We successfully shipped a 10Mb app using Smart Installer.

Of course, one problem you'll have is that most phones don't even have the room for a 75M app. The Smart Installer is going to need to extract the app sis file and will almost certainly do so onto the C: drive. If there isn't 75M on the C: drive the install will fail, even if it's targeted to a different drive.

Thanks, danhicksbyron.
I'm trying to find maximum file size of sis file. Tests are not finished yet, but current results are interesting:

54.6 Mb app successfully installed on E: while on C: there were only 20.8Mb

So, I can suggest that space on C: is not important condition for successful installation.

[detook]

Test results:
1) C: with 20.8 Mb free space - 54.6Mb application installed without issues
2) C: with 20.8 Mb free space - 57.9Mb application installation failed
3) C: with 15.4 Mb free space - 54.6Mb application installation failed

So, danhicksbyron was partially right. Smart installer depends from free space on phone memory.
This ruins all my plans. I tested my app without smart installer and results were acceptable. And now I should ship it with this Smart Installer. Which does not work in my case. Great.

Can I expect that situation will be changed with future versions of Smart Installer?

[danhicksbyron]

You can expect the situation to change with future phones. Then N97mini, eg, has about 200Mb free on C:, vs the 20Mb or so on an N97.

[OviBron]

Hi detook,

I successfully installed a 101 MB Smart Installer wrapper package on mass memory with N8-00 v011.012.

Please tell us which device and firmware you tested with when your large application failed to install.

Thank you!

[detook]

Nokia 5230

Software version V 20.0.005
Software version date 23-03-2010
Custom version 20.0.005.C01.01
Custom version date 23-03-2010

[OviBron]

Thanks for the extra info. It has been passed onto the Smart Installer development team for their investigation.

[trojalia]

I am running into a similar issue - an app that is roughly 20 megs refuses to install with the smart installer but installs fine without it. When I remove some of the content files (mainly images), it then installs correctly with the smart installer.

Is there any type of documentation available listing the maximum file sizes for a Qt app on various phone models? The reason I ask is that my app has failed the QA process on the Ovi store several times for what I can only assume is insufficient memory on the test device.

For what it's worth, I've been testing mainly on a C6-00 and C6-01. Each has at least 150 megs of available internal memory.

[as-dev]

did anyone of you have a solution for this issue?
I am having this issue on symbian anna. Belle, however, is working. Strange.
Any ideas? Are there any additional parameters to set or a different method for deploying content?

[OviBron]

Sorry, the initial bug report that I created long ago was ignored. I'll create another one in another database and hopefully the new team will really look at fixing it this time.

There seem to be two installation issues here.

The first issue reported in this thread was related to large file size maybe causing a "timeout" that killed the Smart Installer during some lengthy synchronous operation. (My speculation.)

The second issue is that there is a limited amount of information that both the Smart Installer and native SW installer can process during an installation. Too much information leads to out of memory error in either SI or native installer. Too much information in this case is more like complexity of an installation instead of only SIS size. Many install files contributes to the complexity of the installation and the amount of parsing, validation, and tracking that must be done.

There isn't a specific magic number of install files that triggers the error.

• Installation file names,
• Path length for install files,
• Conditional installation,
• and embedded SIS files

are some other factors that affect "complexity".

Packages containing many small files are much slower to install and upgrade than similarly sized packages with fewer files. A package that installs 1000 small 1kB files takes noticeably longer than a bigger package that installs 10 "large" 200 kB files.

If you are building an app with a package file that installs 1000+ files than it's worth considering strategies to reduce this number. For example, image maps or container formats like MBM can combine multiple images into a single file.

And you may have noticed that Nokia Maps does not attempt to install map data as SIS files.