How To Speed Up Your Gradle Build

Slow Gradle build? Try disabling anti-virus protection for your Gradle caches directory and your Android Studio project directory. (Gradle caches directory: ~/.gradle/caches.) If you're on Windows, make sure those same directories are excluded from Windows Search indexing, too. For Mac users, excluding those directories from Spotlight is a good idea. Details on which directories to include can be found here.

Developing Android apps on Windows, I've been frustrated by all the time lost to long Gradle builds. Today, I discovered that adding anti-virus exclusions on my cache and build directories cut my clean-rebuild time by roughly 50%. Wow! How is this not the first thing on every Gradle optimization guide? The Windows Search indexing exclusion didn't make quite as big an impact, but it was also pretty major. I've included instructions for Windows 10 below.

To speed up your #Gradle builds, try disabling anti-virus protection on your Gradle caches directory and your #AndroidStudio project directory. For me, this dramatically improved my build times. #AndroidDev
— Mark McClelland (Author) (@markproxy) February 2, 2019

Another tip: put Gradle into offline mode while you're coding away and not adding new dependencies. This prevents Gradle from checking for updates when you know there aren't any, or don't care if there are.

In addition, there are lots of Gradle optimizations you can enable. This guide covers the topic in great depth. I use these flags in my ~/.gradle/gradle.properties file.

org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx6144m <-- Tweak this based on available RAM
org.gradle.caching=true
org.gradle.parallel=true
kotlin.incremental=true

Note that enabling caching means you sometimes have to explicitly clear your caches when switching branches. I run this script when I run into puzzling build issues.

#!/bin/bash


# Clean Android cache
./gradlew cleanBuildCache


# Clean Gradle cache, prompting for each directory
find ~/.gradle/caches -maxdepth 1 -name build-cache* -print -exec rm -rfI {} \;


# Clean Project
./gradlew clean


# Stop Gradle Daemon
./gradlew --stop

You can read more about the various caches in this excellent article: Exploring the Android build process Caching – The ASOS Tech Blog – Medium.

Windows Defender - How to Exclude a Directory

Open Windows Defender Settings
Click "Virus & threat protection"
Click "Virus & threat protection settings"
Scroll down to "Exclusions" and click "Add or remove exclusions"
Click "Add an exclusion" and select "Folder" from the drop-down menu
Navigate to the directory to be excluded, or paste its path into the "Folder" text-box, and click "Select Folder"

Windows Search Indexing - How to Exclude A Directory

Open Windows Control Panel
Search for "index" and choose "Indexing Options"
Click the "Modify" button
Under the appropriate drive letter, navigate to the folder you want to exclude, and make sure it is unchecked
Double-check your work by verifying the directory shows up in the "Exclude" column of the "Summary of selected locations" table

Tip: In Windows File Explorer, you can SHIFT-right-click on a folder and choose "Copy as Path" to copy its full path to the clipboard. This can then be pasted into any standard Windows open-file or select-folder dialog to speed up navigation.

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