Slow Light.exe - AV issue

Question

I'm having an issue which I'd have thought others might have come accross, but I can't find any posts.

My (small) WiX projects are taking ages (2-4mins each) to build on our build server, but are much quicker on my desktop (a few seconds).

After some poking around I've narrowed it down to McAfee scanning the temporary files created by light (located in the TEMP user environment variable). I don't know why it's taking so long to scan - disabling the AV has got the build time to well under 2 mins, previously it was over 20!

Now my issue is how to exclude these temp files from the AV. I don't want to exclude the TEMP folder for obvious reasons and there doesn't appear to be a way of excluding by file name without creating a big hole in the AV.

So I guess my question is, is there a way of configuring light.exe to use a different path other than TEMP? I tried some command line switches with no luck. Maybe I could add something to the Light.exe.config? Cheers.

Answer 1

Can you not just disable real time antivirus scanning on your build machines? My argument for doing this would be that your VM should be full scanned and then disabled and that all files making it's way into the build machine are coming from source control and / or file shares that should have already been scanned at various points upstream in the process.

We ran over 100,000 builds a year at my last job and A/V would have killed us.

Otherwise, if you type light.exe -? you'll see there is an environment variable called WIX_TEMP that overrides the temp directory.