Azure cspkg download speed

Question

... very slow. We are trying to deploy a 280 MB cspkg file using VS2010 tools, and it takes about 35 minutes to download, and another 10 minutes to deploy.

Is there a way to speed up this boot process? We are going to put invariant data in blob and get it out of there, but we would like to know what happens first.

edited to reflect that we are using azure vs2010 integration tools

Answer 1

Both deployment methods (API and Portal) allow you to deploy from a file that is already uploaded to Azure Storage. VSTS tools just use this feature behind the scenes. (In 2010, you must provide credentials for storage for this reason).

You should look into the .cspkg download directly in Blob (via VSTS, and then write a simple download client that breaks the download into blocks that can be loaded at the same time. Then you can configure this (block size and the number of blocks loaded at a time), to make better use of your outgoing bandwidth. Then you just use the api to "build" them in Azure when they are all there. This should really speed up the download.

I think in order to answer your question “what is happening”, you just get the synchronous I / O of WebClient for Azure Storage and all the restrictions that come with it.

Answer 2

We recently encountered a very similar problem, since we had to pack about 40 MB of third-party libraries to establish a SQL connection to Oracle from Windows Azure.

Through Lokad.CQRS, we did exactly what you offer, aka by installing all the large static libraries and keeping the Azure package as thin as possible. It works very well.