Speeding up obfuscation process

Question

So, I've got a moderately to significantly complicated WPF application that I've got a requirement to obfuscate the output assemblies via Dotfuscator (pro edition - the one the client has a license for).

Three issues:

• The obfuscation process crashes with an OutOfMemoryException approximately 85% of the time
• It takes a LONG time - the average obfuscation pass takes about 56 minutes to complete
• There are a whole heap of various issues that cause the app to crash with the obfuscated assemblies, from reflection-based lookups to resources.

The first problem I've been able to mitigate by running via the command line as opposed to the GUI (it doesn't crash, at least), and the third wouldn't be that big of an issue if I could quickly iterate over combinations of options instead of maybe getting 5 attempts per working day.

It's really the total time that's killing me; anyone aware of any "quick-fix" ideas to dramatically improve the time taken for obfuscation? Is it possible some goofy thing I've done is causing some sort of "Vapor-lock" during the process, increasing the processing time? Do I need to press the client to use a different obfuscator?

Some details:

• Approx. 38 assemblies/exes in the application (of which maybe 5-10 are third party dlls marked as 'artifact' so they don't get obfuscated)
• The box is a semi-beefy physical server, not a VM.
• I'm using a config file to drive the obfuscator as opposed to processing each assembly individually.
• I've already marked a number of excludes in said config file for things like generated Resources
• All assemblies are marked as 'library'

Any thoughts and/or SWAGs would be most appreciated.

Answer 1

You need more memory most likely. Dotfuscator isn't exactly lightweight in memory when running through large projects. I'd recommend 2 gigs as a minimum for most projects, and 4 gigs preferable. Also, it might run faster under 64-bit, due to the extra virtual memory space. Also, you might want to ensure that you're losing the latest version of Dotfuscator, since there have been some performance improvements between releases in the past

Excludes usually won't speed up Dotfuscator significantly unless you're excluding whole assemblies.