Cache plug-in spent lots of time to write log files which might not be used/understood by many developers.

[lifengl]

We suggest an option to turn off writing log files on the cache consumer side, as many developers would never read them.

[djack42]

I might add that it takes some non negligible time on solutions with more than 100 projects and there is no report for that step in the output.
Writing those logs takes time and disk space and the CI have to clean it up next round anyway (https://github.com/microsoft/MSBuildCache/blob/84e8d211a75e01fa83b2b17a79b7d1fd35633228/src/Common/MSBuildCachePluginBase.cs#L243C9-L248C58).

This should be an option.

[dfederm]

Is there data to show that this actually takes significant time to write logs?

Without logs, operations become entirely non-debuggable, and due to the nature of a stateful system like caching which is non-repeatable, this can make it very difficult to understand what is happening when you need to investigate.

[djack42]

One of my projects has 1 of 8 pipelines writing 280 MB of logs each time, small files and increasingly growing as net framework projects are copying all the referenced projects outputs... a lot of redundant fingerprints.
And when in prod, I don't need those logs. I could use an environment variable on my pipeline to enable debugging.

That build takes 4 to 7 minutes with MSBuildCache enabled and 14 minutes without and when using it, there are around 2 minutes after the build where there is nothing written in the output and i can see that the process is writing those logs I don't need.
It's CPU time, IOs and on larger solution i guess it is accumulating.

[dfederm]

And when in prod, I don't need those logs.

Why not?

there are around 2 minutes after the build where there is nothing written in the output and i can see that the process is writing those logs I don't need.

I don't believe this is enough evidence to show that logging is the problem. Can you elaborate what you mean by "nothing written in the output"? Are these for cache hits or cache misses? If cache misses, then is there network activity since the outputs are likely being written to the cache. That's what I suspect you're observing as the cache uploads are async and depending on how much output you have there may be a long tail of uploading. The cache client logs would confirm what's happening there.