Building and Running App Via Gradle and Android Studio Is Slower Than Via Eclipse

Building and running app via Gradle and Android Studio is slower than via Eclipse

Hardware

I'm sorry, but upgrading development station to SSD and tons of ram has probably a bigger influence than points below combined.

Tools versions

Increasing build performance has major priority for the development teams, so make sure you are using latest Gradle and Android Gradle Plugin.

Configuration File

Create a file named gradle.properties in whatever directory applies:

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

Append:

# IDE (e.g. Android Studio) users:
# Settings specified in this file will override any Gradle settings
# configured through the IDE.

# For more details on how to configure your build environment visit
# http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/build_environment.html

# The Gradle daemon aims to improve the startup and execution time of Gradle.
# When set to true the Gradle daemon is to run the build.
# TODO: disable daemon on CI, since builds should be clean and reliable on servers
org.gradle.daemon=true

# Specifies the JVM arguments used for the daemon process.
# The setting is particularly useful for tweaking memory settings.
# https://medium.com/google-developers/faster-android-studio-builds-with-dex-in-process-5988ed8aa37e#.krd1mm27v
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx5120m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

# When configured, Gradle will run in incubating parallel mode.
# This option should only be used with decoupled projects. More details, visit
# http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/multi_project_builds.html#sec:decoupled_projects
org.gradle.parallel=true

# Enables new incubating mode that makes Gradle selective when configuring projects. 
# Only relevant projects are configured which results in faster builds for large multi-projects.
# http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/multi_project_builds.html#sec:configuration_on_demand
org.gradle.configureondemand=true

# Set to true or false to enable or disable the build cache. 
# If this parameter is not set, the build cache is disabled by default.
# http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/build-cache
android.enableBuildCache=true

Gradle properties works local if you place them at projectRoot\gradle.properties and globally if you place them at user_home\.gradle\gradle.properties. Properties applied if you run gradle tasks from console or directly from idea:

IDE Settings

It is possible to tweak Gradle-IntelliJ integration from the IDE settings GUI. Enabling "offline work" (check answer from yava below) will disable real network requests on every "sync gradle file".

Native multi-dex

One of the slowest steps of the apk build is converting java bytecode into single dex file. Enabling native multidex (minSdk 21 for debug builds only) will help the tooling to reduce an amount of work (check answer from Aksel Willgert below).

Dependencies

Prefer @aar dependencies over library sub-projects.

Search aar package on mavenCentral, jCenter or use jitpack.io to build any library from github. If you are not editing sources of the dependency library you should not build it every time with your project sources.

Antivirus

Consider to exclude project and cache files from antivirus scanning. This is obviously a trade off with security (don't try this at home!). But if you switch between branches a lot, then antivirus will rescan files before allowing gradle process to use it, which slows build time (in particular AndroidStudio sync project with gradle files and indexing tasks). Measure build time and process CPU with and without antivirus enabled to see if it is related.

Profiling a build

Gradle has built-in support for profiling projects. Different projects are using a different combination of plugins and custom scripts. Using --profile will help to find bottlenecks.

Every run of projects in android studio is slow

Android Studio is slower than eclipse in many ways. I don't think there is a way of speeding the software up all together from the user side, all we can do it wait for a update for the software.

Follow this post: Android studio Gradle build speed up

Might help you make things faster on Android Studio.

Gradle build (Android project) is very slow

This has been around for some time now.

Unfortunately, android studio's make seems to perform a clean every single time, causing the previously DEX'd files to be deleted.

AFAIK you cannot do more than what you already did.
It is something Google should work on (regarding the DEX phase).

See related: Building and running app via Gradle and Android Studio is slower than via Eclipse

android studio 1.2 gradle is very slow

had the same problem.

What I did was to change the global gradle settings to offline work which can be done by going to Preferences => Gradle. This did make a difference.

Another method I have seen people use, but which I have not used yet is to create a gradle.properties in the gradle folder like so:

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

Please check out this link for more options as well as a detailed explanation on speeding up gradle.

Hope this helps!.

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