Improve the transfer speed of Artifact download task and Artifact Publishing

Problem Definition

The time taken to download an artifact within a plan using artifact download task is much slower (roughly 6 times) than the time taken for a plan from bamboo server to bamboo agent.

Steps to reproduce

• Dedicate a remote agent to a plan
• Have a plan with an artifact download task (that downloads an artifact of size 4GB) and a script task that wgets the artifact from the Bamboo server.
• Run the build.
• Compare the difference in speed and duration from the build log.
  The wget task transfer speed is faster than artifact download task

Suggested Solution

Artifact downloader task transfers artifacts as a compressed tar file. It would be great if we improve the implementation of this feature, so that we get a faster transfer rate.

There could be some switch to turn on or off the compression for artifact download task manually.

Why this is important

When the artifact that we transfer is huge (like 4GB binary), it consumes a lot of time and contributes to the overall build time.

Workaround

Use script task to wget the artifact instead of using Artifact download task.