We noticed a huge amount of variability of the size of InstalledBuilds of the UE editor (85Gb vs. 154Gb).
The differences come mainly from intermediate files found under Engine/Programs/…/Intermediate. It looks like the script grabs those files and places them in the output despite not being part of the build process.
So, if a developer had those intermediate files in their disk from past build processes, those files can add 60Gb or more of unnecessary artifacts in the InstalledBuild output.
Could you confirm this is not expected? We should be able to workaround the issue but I thought I would raise the issue here as it seems like a bug in the XML build configuration.
Check the CopyEditorExceptions property in InstalledEngineFilter.xml. You can add anything you want to exclude there, and wildcard rules are supported. This should help alleviate your issue to some extent. If you want to verify whether the behavior is as expected, you can look under ${YourEngineDir}\Engine\Saved\BuildGraph. Each node will output its corresponding manifest-related files. If the files you mentioned do not appear in the manifest, it is very likely that you did not clean the LocalBuilds directory beforehand.
InstalledEngineBuild.xml assumes it’s running from a fresh checkout of the engine, ensuring the environment is clean.
Building such a build from a local developer’s engine checkout without cleaning it beforehand will include many potentially unnecessary files.
For these program files specifically, we are indeed including the entire folder using a wildcard, so UAT does not distinguish where those files come from.
As an additional test, could you run your UAT command with the -clean parameter?
Overall, I’m afraid this behavior is expected, and we recommend you build an installed build from a fresh engine checkout/build.
Ideally, this happens in your CI process to ensure you get consistent results.