In some large Salesforce deployments, you might receive the following error message
The metadata deployment exceeded the maximum allowed size of 50MB
What is this error?
This occurs because Salesforce has a built-in limitation on the amount of metadata that can be deployed in a single deployment. This is documented in the following Salesforce article: Metadata Limits
The maximum size of the deployed or retrieved .zip file is 39 MB
The same limitation applies to deployments with the Salesforce CLI, Ant, Workbench, or any other app that uses the Salesforce Metadata API.
How to fix this?
We recommend splitting your deployment into smaller deployments, for example:
Deploy Page Layouts and Validation Rules in one deployment
Create another deployment for LWC and Apex
In the above example, this works because LWC and Apex have no dependencies to Page Layouts and Validation Rules.
You may need to adjust your logic based on the metadata types you are deploying.