Android studio Gradle build speed up

Question

Since the last update (Build from june 25) any changes in the Android studio Gradle is painfully slow. And it also seems to autotrack changes when you edit the file and recompile on keyup.

Each change takes several minutes on my i5.

Any idea how I can speed up my Gradle changes?

Answer 1

The dev are working on it. Like I posted in this answer the fastest solution right now is to use gradle from the command line and you should switch to binary libs for all modules you do not develop. On g+ there is a discussion with the developers about it.

Answer 2

Definitely makes a difference: How To… Speed up Gradle build time

Just create a file named gradle.properties in the following directory:

/home/<username>/.gradle/ (Linux)
/Users/<username>/.gradle/ (Mac)
C:\Users\<username>\.gradle (Windows)

Add this line to the file:

org.gradle.daemon=true

Answer 3

This is what I did and my gradle build speed improved dramatically! from 1 min to 20sec for the first build and succeeding builds became from 40 sec to 5 sec.

In the gradle.properties file Add this:

org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx8192M -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

In the Command Line Arguments via Go to File > Other Settings> default Settings >Build, Execution, Deploy> Complier and add the following arguments to Command Line Arguments

Add this:

--debug --stacktrace -a, --no-rebuild -q, --quiet --offline

Answer 4

dexOptions {
    incremental true
    javaMaxHeapSize "4g"
}

Answer 5

Acording to this page of the Android Team of Wikimedia Apps, a good way of optimize Gradle builds is adding this lines to your ~/.gradle/gradle.properties

org.gradle.daemon=true                                                          
org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.configureondemand=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048M

For those who do not have the file there are two ways to do it:

1. Add the file locally in your project by creating a file called gradle.properties in the project root or,

2. You can set them globally for all your projects by creating the same file in your home directory (%UserProfile%.gradle on Windows, ~/.gradle on Linux and Mac OS X)

   It is a good practice to set the properties in your home directory, rather than on a project level.

Answer 6

few commands we can add to the gradle.properties file:

org.gradle.configureondemand=true - This command will tell gradle to only build the projects that it really needs to build. Use Daemon — org.gradle.daemon=true - Daemon keeps the instance of the gradle up and running in the background even after your build finishes. This will remove the time required to initialize the gradle and decrease your build timing significantly.

org.gradle.parallel=true - Allow gradle to build your project in parallel. If you have multiple modules in you project, then by enabling this, gradle can run build operations for independent modules parallelly.

Increase Heap Size — org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx3072m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 - Since android studio 2.0, gradle uses dex in the process to decrease the build timings for the project. Generally, while building the applications, multiple dx processes runs on different VM instances. But starting from the Android Studio 2.0, all these dx processes runs in the single VM and that VM is also shared with the gradle. This decreases the build time significantly as all the dex process runs on the same VM instances. But this requires larger memory to accommodate all the dex processes and gradle. That means you need to increase the heap size required by the gradle daemon. By default, the heap size for the daemon is about 1GB.

Ensure that dynamic dependency is not used. i.e. do not use implementation 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:27.0.+'. This command means gradle will go online and check for the latest version every time it builds the app. Instead use fixed versions i.e. 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:27.0.2'