Can anything be done to accelerate Ant deployment times?

Question

We are using Ant (a mix of command line, as well as through Atlassian Bamboo/AWS) to do sandbox-to-sandbox deployments. To narrow the focus of this question, let's assume unit tests are not being run.

We have compiled all classes/triggers through the web UI. Is there anything else that can be done at the org level to speed up these deployments? They do not take an unreasonable amount of time, but any time gained makes a small extra step worthwhile.

I've seen this question and this one as well, but they focus on Eclipse and prod deployments, and therefore introduce a factor of test execution time - my question is in regards to sandbox-to-sandbox quick deploys (no unit tests being executed) using Ant.

Answer 1

About the only thing that I can think of is to have ANT zip (compress) the metadata that you retrieve. It probably won't amount to much of a difference though.

If you're retrieving the metadata from your source org, you'll still be transmitting the uncompressed metadata over the internet. If you're pulling the metadata from a local repository, then you save on that transmission time.

+edit: After looking through the docs some more, the <sf:retrieve> task is grabbing compressed data. The unzip attribute defaults to true, but if you set it to false I'd imagine you could do without the <zip> task (unless you're pulling the metadata from a local repo)

-edit

a sample ANT target might look like this:

<target name="betweenSandboxes">
    <mkdir dir="TempFolder" />
    <sf:retrieve username="<username here>" password="<password here>" serverurl="<url here>" maxPoll="<poll rate here>" retrieveTarget="TempFolder" unpackaged="package.xml"/>
    <zip basedir="TempFolder" destfile="deployment.zip" update="true" />
    <sf:deploy username="<username here>" password="<password here>" serverurl="<url here>" maxPoll="<poll rate here>" zipFile="deployment.zip" testLevel="Default">
</target>