The other day I looked at a full Firefox build log from TBPL and noticed that ~84,000 of the ~170,000 lines in the log I looked at was output from archive processes. We were printing thousands of lines showing the files that were being added and extracted from the archives that contain test files!

I thought this was wasteful, so I filed bug 757397 and coded up a patch. Ted agreed that these lines were rather worthless and the patch has landed in mozilla-inbound.

The result of the patch is build logs are about half as big in terms of lines. And, it appears at least 500kb is shaved off the compressed log files as well.

The real world impact is you should be able to load build logs from the server faster because they are smaller.

If you were parsing this data before and are impacted by this, please leave a comment on the aforementioned bug and we'll go from there.