I am trying to prepare the windows libs to live into a submodule and one of the first things todo is reduce the size of the static libraries. One in particular is >200MB, the AWS EC2 library. Through some trial and error I've found a method to reduce the size, but I am not sure if it will effect linkability. One of the steps is to rebuild the archive index, this is taking over 30minutes

35:47.01 ar s ./aws-cpp-sdk-ec2.lib