If the tree you are archiving contains an internal symlink, the target files will be archived twice. This can lead to a very large increase in the size of the archived data and consequently, the time it takes to archive it.

Example:

/archive-root
/big-directory
/symlink -> big-directory

Then every file in big directory will be archived twice.

A fix would be for Hudson to detect internal symlinks and copy them rather than dereference them.