Question

Can anyone confirm (preferably with a link to docs) whether MSDeploy packages are uploaded in their entirety before the files are sync’d or does the sync occur between msdeploy.exe and msdeploy.axd (with only modified files being uploaded)?

Or, to put it another way, if I have a 1GB package zip that only contains 1MB worth of changed files will msdeploy upload the entire 1GB package to MsDeploy.axd and perform the sync on the server or will it only upload the 1MB worth of changed files?

Answer 1

Is this documentation official enough for you to trust that the behavior you observed is deterministic?

http://www.iis.net/learn/publish/using-web-deploy/introduction-to-web-deploy

Section “How does Web Deploy compare to FTP?”, point 1:

Web Deploy is faster than FTP. Web Deploy does not issue a different command for each operation. Instead, it does a comparison at the start of the sync and only transfers changes.