After a job is built on a slave selected build artifacts in the workspace may be copied from the slave to the master so those artifacts are archived. The Fast Archiver plugin takes advantage of the fact that there are usually only incremental changes between build artifacts of consecutive builds. Such incremental changes are detected and only those changes that need to be sent from the slave to the master are transferred, thus saving network bandwidth. The algorithm is inspired by rsync’s weak rolling checksum algorithm, which can efficiently identify changes.

The changes are gzipped to further reduce network load.