The archive option was introduced for CLI deployments hitting rate limits like the limit on the maximum amount of files. Prebuilt deployments commonly use archive uploads as they generate thousands of files at build time.
Previously, archive deployments were always compressed into one large file with the only existing --archive option, tgz. Deployments using tgz may hit the file size upload limit. Additionally, uploading one large archive file is slower than uploading multiple file parts.
The beta split-tgz format resolves these issues by splitting large archives into smaller parts. split-tgz avoids the static file upload limit and uploads large prebuilt projects up to 30% faster.
Example usage: vercel deploy --archive=split-tgz
Learn more about CLI deployments.