Description:
Adding a large number of Additional Files to a Software Distribution package seems to fail at a certain point.
Problem:
There is a practical limit to the number of files that can be added to a Software Distribution package that will effective when deploying. This quantity is approximately 1,000 files depending on the system and performance.
Cause:
When additional files are associated with a package prior to download they need to be hashed and checked. Once this is complete then they go through the download process for each file to get them cached to the client device. As such, when the file counts begins to get large this overhead burdens the overall process and becomes such that the package will fail due to the duration that these files are taking to prepare, cache, hash, and download.
Solution:
There is a practical limit to the number of files that can be added to a Software Distribution package that will be effective when deploying software. This quantity is approximately 1,000 files depending on the system and performance.
For packages that require a substantial number of files beyond this general limit it is recommended to add all needed files to an archive (.zip) and then add this file as one single file, deploy the package, then uncompress (unzip) the files on the client side. Once these files are uncompressed you can run the setup executable and the necessary switches for the package from a .bat script.
The reason this method works is that it, of course, makes the distribution to only contain one file that needs to be hashed and downloaded vs. many, even thousands of, files that need to each be hashed and downloaded.