Thanks Brian for the question! I'd be more than happy to answer it.

About 2-3 months ago, one of our partners who resides in a nation with pretty poor internet asked us to please please please PLEASE try to reduce the size of our installers. So, the team did a full evaluation, and this led to various changes in the way things are built. 

First off, if you take a look at the download sizes of the Linux installer executables for Mail and Stats, you'll notice those dropped from about 80MB to around 20MB. That's because we changed out our interface components for the installer so that we could enable .Net Trimming support on the installer files. This removed all framework files that were being included but were not actually used for anything in the installers.

After that, we looked into the Windows installers. Unfortunately, MSI has a lot of bloat that we can't do much about. However, we did notice that over 1/2 of our installer size was ClamAV, so we focused on that a bit.

As you may or may not know, ClamAV is going through a transition right now, where part of their system is written in Rust, and part is written in other languages. Most of the size of their downloads stems from two places: PDB files and their rust library.

PDB files, for those that are not aware, are symbol files used to translate code into readable strings for things like stack traces. Those are completely unnecessary for us to distribute, since we do not forward on stack traces to our logs anyways, and if someone wants to get them for their own use, they are available on the ClamAV website.

These files represent the missing 64 MB of disk space you see, since we no longer include them. Interestingly, the uncompressed size of these files was closer to 250 MB once they were extracted from the installer.

The Rust files are another story...

Those ARE required, and the main clamav_rust.lib file is over 160MB extracted. What's worse is that their current 1.5 beta has a rust file that's over 280MB.

So once that comes out and we incorporate it, you'll see our installer increase in size again, unless they make an effort to size that down before they go production. But since they've marked 1.5 as their release candidate, we're not holding our breath.

I hope this helps!